I was wanting to get to the CherryPy IRC
channel and I had the
handy URL irc://irc.oftc.net/cherrypy. I could fiddle with the URL
bits in the server dialog box, but I wondered why I couldn't just get X-
Chat to swallow the URL whole. Turns out this is not a capability that
X-Chat is all that eager to present to users. Nothing on the FAQs,
nothing in the menus, and nothing without a lot of digging in the on-
line help. There is the command line: `xchat
irc://irc.oftc.net/cherrypy`, but this doesn't seem very useful in
practice if you already have IRC sessions set-up for autoload. It
basically just launches a new X-Chat session with all your defaults, and
seems to ignore the URL you specified on the command line (I'm using X-
Chat version 2.4.0). I've seen others voicing similar complaints.
Anyway, the recipe I found that works for me is:
- Create a new tab (Ctrl-T)
- Type
/server [irc-url]in the entry line (e.g. `/server irc://irc.oftc.net/cherrypy`
Works well, but shouldn't be such a deep secret. What X-Chat really
needs is an "Open URL" menu item. Simple as that. And it really needs
its command line behavior cleaned up if it wants to be the default
handler for irc:// URLs clicked in other apps such as browsers.