The echo command is a little discouraging because it violates the DNRY strategy. However, a couple of angle brackets aren't unreasonable to add. However, I am a little mystified as to how to attach the symbol for the user's mode in the channel, such as @ or +. Also, I don't see it in the docs, but are "[[" and "]]" the escape characters for the square brackets?
I like your idea of just adding a mark to indicate additional information. That could work, combined with merely an echo to an auxiliary window, devoted to clone scanning or a combination of other things, instead of clicking. More like, "see below".
The effect I want is to associate all someone's nicks with the same identifier, which might as well just be the first nick they were observed to use. For example, I would appear as:
<castironpi|away (castironpi)> Hello!
I'm aware it's still not foolproof. You'll get at least one "false positive", which is if person X uses nick A, then switches to nick B, then person Y joins as nick A, then switches to nick C. Both people will have "A" in the tag:
<A> hello
<B (A)> hello again
<A> person two
<C (A)> person two again
In addition, you'll get a number of false negatives, which are the same person joining from different hosts, and not being linked to their first observed nick.
Maybe it would just be easier to just print the whole prefix! Currently, I think I'm favoring that option, with an auxiliary window for all chans combined:
on 1:TEXT:*:*:{
if (!$window(@dev)) window @dev
echo @dev [[ $+ $chan $+ ]] < $+ $fulladdress $+ > $1-
}
Also, I'd like to point out, that the degree to which the extra information makes the chan look cluttered, varies by the average distribution of line lengths, and to a lesser extent, composition.
Thanks for your reply.