The problem with nick brackets as an option alone is that it's far too simplistic.
There are so many other "such small" things people would love to customize (colorize nick, colorize timestamp, colorize the nick prefix only, use more complex text surrounding a nickname).. Should Khaled add every single possibility of the above?
I'd propose a more extensible solution: A customizable set of lines that mirc could interpolate much like the way Winamp can customize the titlebar field. This would allow *complete* theming of mIRC for standard events; much better than just "nick brackets". For instance, you would have a list of text fields that define the default interpolation mIRC uses on each line (for most events) the same way mIRC handles the dclick/sclick events in Alt+O -> Mouse. The user would be able to customize things like lines of text by writing the following (example syntax) in a text field:
$timestamp <$pnick> $text
An action would be in another text field defined as:
$timestamp * $pnick $text
This would essentially be equivalent to scripting theme events but without a lot of the details of the actual script engine. For instance, dealing with proper echo syntax, haltdefing, etc, would not be necessary, nor would handling edge cases for /commands in ON INPUT. In addition, mIRC could define some custom identifiers for use in the textboxes as a shortcut for common identifiers ($nick(#,$nick).pnick -> $pnick, $1- -> $text without losing spaces) and even modify the syntax to make it easier to write (remove the need for $+ by defining a consistent character set ([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]*) for identifier names).
This would be the ideal solution that would cover all the bases and edge cases here. It's a little harder to implement, but it would actually be implementing a lot of feature suggestions at once.
