bits and pieces
This is the part where I list the other little things I have picked up
This is where I point to the other things I have written
i wrote about command line here. most of the things i anticipate appearing on this page are going to be me learning more about this.
i wrote about the basics of vim here. i don't know how one would edit things in the tilde-verse without using vim, nano, or emacs...
After shelling in, if you type `irc` into terminal, you will go into a tilde-specific chat room. awesome. ask questions, because folks are super helpful and friendly. oh god, how do you get out of here?!?!?! the answer is `/quit`
you may notice your handle(name) in a different color (potentially even hear a ping?). This is because someone mentioned you in their public communications.
FANCY IRC
apparently, you can communicate directly with someone (nobody else in the channel can see) by typing `/msg persons_name`. Apparently, you can see these by typing alt+ the-number-of-the-message-queue or alt+left arrow or right arrow. These don't seem to work for me, though (I get £ and ¢ signs). I will seek remedial training and report back.
oh geez, guys, this is a rabbit hole....
- go to http://www.irssi.org/download#sources and download source.
- read the INSTALL file and despair
- pour yourself a drink and muster up all your gumption
- abandon hopei, all ye who enter here, and despair before the royal clusterfuck before you
ok. huge thanks to cmr, ando, and vilmibm for helping to slay the terrible dragon. Here is what we learned about tilde.town IRC clients for Mac.
Why did we slay a dragon instead of just using terminal? Because an IRC client can do all sorts of wonderful things:
- Terminal will not save your conversations. If you scroll up... nothing. This is terribly inconvenient for a n00b who had just finished asking for a bunch of help, but can not copy the useful tips and save them for posterity.
- Notifications - an IRC Client can let you know if there is anything happening in the channels (chat rooms) you are in- I now have a lovely bell when a fellow tilde.town member (literally) chimes in.
- Private conversations - rather than talking to everyone, you can send 1-1 messages!
Setting up MacIrssi on a Mac
first of all, unless you are a master at Homebrew, don't try to install irssi from source. Just don't. Instead, go to MacIrssi, download, and install (this happened last night after a few hours of beating my head- I don't recall there being anything particularly weird about install)
Open MacIrssi and go to Preferences (command + , OR MacIrssi>Prefences)
Go to the Servers tab. Under the box with a bunch of irc server, there will be a plus box and a strike through box- click the plus.
This will open up irc.example.com below. Replace that with `localhost`, make sure Port is 6667, and the "Connect Automaticlaly on Startup" box is checked.
Quit MacIrssi
Open Terminal and run `ssh -NL 6667:tilde.town:6667 user_name@tilde.town`. Nothing is going to like it's happening, and that's just fine.
Re-open MacIrssi - you'll see a lot of standard-issue IRC notifications. Hopefully. Type `/join #tildetown`
IRC Commands to get you started
`/join channel_name` - this works for all sorts of channels- more later!
`/part` - leave the channel you are in - super helpful when you accidentally open a bunch of tabs to non-existent channels when you are first figuring things out.
`/msg user_name` - send a provate message to user_name - this will open up a new tab for this conversation. You can click the tab, or type command + arrow keys to move left & right through the tabs.
`/me dons a fancy hat` - this shows up "*User_Name dons a fancy hat" - a useful way to describe thoughts/emotions.
`/quit` - closes IRC
`/help` - opens up all of the available IRC commands. From there, you can type `help whois` or another interesting command and you will get a description of what that command does.
`/q` - if you want to close a 1-1 message tab.
I probably should have known this before, but TIL you can't add an HTML comment between the css tags. ¯\(°_o)/¯
Tricks and goodies of Tilde.Town!
you have to be a tilde town community memeber to play with these
Tweet! -- in terminal, type `echo "thing you want to say" | tweet` and it will magically show up on TildeTown's twitter!
Alternate tweeting method: `tweet <enter> thing you want to say <enter> ctrl+d`
Pro Tweeting Tips from ~datagrok
- if you want to check how long your tweet is before tweeting it, use the command "wc -c" instead of "tweet" in the same ways
- it's not perfect because twitter replaces URLs with shortened urls and other shenanigans
- echo foo | wc -c returns "4" because of an implied <enter> after the word. Which counts as 1 letter but gets stripped off before sending...
Haiku! -- type `haiku` into the terminal. A randomly generated haiku will appear!