Joined: 4/30/2008
Posts: 89
Location: Northeast Kansas USA, GMT -06:00
For those that missed the memo, they've disallowed connections coming from mibbit, so therefore some users who chat with us on our IRC channel regularly will have to use Freenode's own webchat portal here:
http://webchat.freenode.net/
Citing abuse, the FreeNode staff decided that they could no longer trust the mibbit webchat client and prevented any new connections from the service. This will affect some of our regular users on our channel.
You're not going to get much of a war for declaring XChat, it's clearly the best. XD
Unrelated to which irc client is the "best", I have a technical question. I have asked this in the xchat official forum and in the OpenSUSE newsgroup, and got exactly 0 answers. Not expecting any answers here either, but it doesn't hurt to try. Maybe someone here will have some suggestions. (I apologize for the long post.)
In the past I had OpenSUSE 11.0 installed in my computer. It was an upgrade on top of OpenSUSE 10.2 (which in turn was an upgrade on top of SUSE 9.3). I used XChat as my IRC client, and it had no problems in showing kanjis and other special UTF8 symbols: They worked out of the box the very first time I installed and tried XChat. (I'm using a special local proxy software which intelligently converts everything which comes from the IRC server to UTF8.)
However, due to some problems (long story) I had to make a fresh installation of OpenSUSE 11.0 from scratch. I restored the contents of my home directory to the new system. Everything else is working fine, just the same way as before, except for XChat.
For some reason I cannot figure out, XChat is no longer showing kanjis nor other special symbols in its text box. Please note that:
- Kanjis and other special symbols work and are showing properly in the XChat input box. However, they are not showing in the main text box. Thus it's clearly not a problem in the entire program, just in the text box in particular.
- It's not a problem with the font. It doesn't matter which font I choose, it doesn't work. With some fonts the kanjis show as empty space, while with others they show as dotted squares. The exact same font shows the kanjis just fine eg. in Konsole.
- The UTF8 codes are there in the text box. If I copy-paste the text from the main text box to eg. Konsole (or the XChat input box), the kanjis show up just fine. In other words, XChat (or anything else) is not mangling or destroying the UTF8 codes: They are still there intact, and can be copied somewhere else and they work just fine. XChat is just not showing them properly.
- Most curiously, this problem is only happening with kanjis and other exotic symbols. It's not happening with more conventional non-ascii characters, such as umlaut vowels. These are also UTF8-encoded, and XChat is showing them fine, so it's clearly interpreting the contents of the main text box as UTF8 and not something else. For some reason it seems to be mapping only part of the UTF8 characters to the font, but not all of them.
- I have tried changing server settings, to no avail. (OTOH I'm pretty sure that cannot be the problem because, as said, the UTF8 codes are there in the text box just fine. They are just not showing properly.)
- As already mentioned, they worked just fine with my previous installation of OpenSUSE 11.0, but after a reinstall they stopped working. Thus I know for a fact that they can be made to work. I just can't figure out what got broken in the process.
- Also as mentioned, XChat seems to be the only app which is exhibiting this problem. For example Konsole and KWrite are showing the kanjis just fine, even with the exact same font as I'm using in XChat.
- Yes, I have tried to closely examine all possible XChat settings that might be related to the issue (at least those available in the GUI), to no avail. XChat doesn't seem to have many such settings.
Warp: this sound most awkward.
Just some random ideas: Have you tried deleting/renaming your ~/.xchat2 directory to start off fresh? If you have backlogging activated, maybe something's wrong in there. Is this also the case in new channels or in queries with people you haven't spoken to directly? Have you tried newer/older versions of XChat? Does this also happen without iconvircproxy?
I've used both Trillian and ChatZilla for IRC; Chatzilla wins for me because I use a PortableApps version of Firefox from my flash drive, and it makes one less program I have to keep on it.
