Well, ever since I saw the post I figured I would try my hand at a secondary connection with sockets. So far, so good. I have the connection open, and have assigned all the major events to signals. This way you can have the nice mirc functionality with a socket connections. i.e.
:KingTomato!MyName@my.mask.com PRIVMSG #king-tomato :Hey everyone
That would trigger a ktclone_text signal. From there, I set %name, %taget (not chan because it could be a query also), and the address of the user. As you can see, the nick that is really sent from the server includes address 5. I made it so that the variable %address contains that whole string, and %nick is up to the ! in the address. In this case, you'd have:
%nick = KingTomato
%address = KingTomato!MyName@my.mask.com
Then from there, use $mask(%adress, <number>) to get your address.
Again, all the main functions like PRIVMSG, INVITE, JOIN, KICK, MODE, PART, QUIT, etc are all atached to events. I'm not quite done yet, as I am making a nice dialog to go with it, but here is the sneak preview:
I'll let you know when it's done