The one Feature i miss in mIRC the most

Theres pretty much only one Feature thats missing in mIRC - and thats a column-layout for TimeStamps / NickNames / Message Text.

Essentially what X-Chat does.

It makes reading the Chat a lot easier as you dont have to visually decipher where the Nickname ended and where the Message starts. And if the next line is a new Message or just Text that wrapped around below the other Nicknames, due to a linebreak.

Oh and theres also one annoying behaviour : When using Color-Codes in the TimeStamps, whenever copying a piece of text or an incomplete URL, mIRC will copy all this INCLUDING its Color-Codes.
When pasting this into FireFox for example, it will completely mess up the Input-Line due to the Special Characters in the mIRC Color-Codes.

Thanks for your patience and keep up the Good Work

Control codes are only copied if you hold the ctrl key while dragging and releasing over the text. If the ctrl key is not depressed while copying, mirc will not copy the control codes.

As far as columns go, i would much prefer that mirc not be designed internally this way.

Code:

[hh:mm:ss:tt] [? nickname1] abcd
[hh:mm:ss:tt]     [? nick1] efgh
[hh:mm:ss:tt]    [? nicky1] bleh text

The above for example is quite easily scriptable (best results using a fixed width font). As for properly wordwrapping long text so the continued line would be aligned to the right of the nickname, i can not think of any possible way to do this correctly without the use of a dll.

I guess i am not against such a feature, a number of scripts do this type of alignment for nicks/timestamps. Just as long as it is completely optional (ability to use current layout), does not affect the scripting, and does not affect the highlighting ability (that is dragging to copy/paste).

I think XChat's way of displaying the nick column is annoying, and I always disable it when I use XChat.

With indenting the line, it can easily be scripted:

Code:

on ^*:TEXT:*:*:{ 
  echo -i $+ $calc($len($strip($timestamp $nick)) + 3) $target $timestamp &lt; $+ $nick $+ &gt; $1- 
  halt
}

You would need a DLL to do the column thing if it is not built into mIRC.

Ah yes, i was unaware of the -i flag.

Code:

on ^*:TEXT:*:*:{
  var %pad_max = 13
  if ($len($nick) &lt; %pad_max) {
    var %pad_len = $calc(%pad_max - $len($nick))
    echo -i $+ $calc($len($strip($timestamp $nick)) + 3 + %pad_len) $target $timestamp $str($chr(160),%pad_len) $+ &lt; $+ $nick $+ &gt; $1-
  }
  else {
    var %pad_len = $calc($len($nick) - %pad_max)
    echo -i $+ $calc($len($strip($timestamp $nick)) + 3 - %pad_len) $target $timestamp &lt; $+ $nick $+ &gt; $1-
  }
  halt
}

This is about the best i could come up with in a short time and without the use of a dll, however there are several things to take note of.

- Tthe use of $chr(160) to pad will not work in all cases, since not all fonts return a white space for chr 160.
- Due to the undocumented indent limit (25), if the length of timestamp+nick+4 [ $calc($len($strip($timestamp $nick)) + 3) ] is more than timestamp+%pad_max+4 and/or exceeds the indent limit the nick will pertrude past the indent point. Apologies if i did not explain this point very well.
- Due to a problem with the way indenting mishandles text with control charactors, you may experience times when it seems to indent incorrectly. More specifically any occurances of <space><ctrlchr><space> seem to be what causes it to function incorrectly.
- A Fixed width font must be used.
- %pad_max can be increased or decreased to change the width of the nickname "column"

Wow, this is seriously beautiful

.
Im using Courier-New as my IRC Font and happen to have Control-Code-Stripping enabled, so this works just fine !

Thanks a lot for your effort guys !

I didnt really want to go XChat anyways *cough*

.

As the above Script just uses an on Text Event it do not "align" Actions and Own Text f.e.

I already wrote an Addon that do something similar so this. You can find it here : Message Extensions

To use it just enable the "Align Channel Text" feature in the Theme-Tab (Dont Worry - the default "Theme" looks like mIRC itself).

I would like to get some Feedback for this as i plan to update it soon after a while without new updates...