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Show HN: Halloy – A GUI Application in Rust for IRC

172 points| culinary-robot | 2 years ago |github.com

101 comments

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throwaway2037|2 years ago

Holy shit this GUI framework looks good. I am a Qt fanboi, but this looks great. Normally, I skip all the "X for Rust" posts as a bunch of fanaticism. Could it really be different this time???

The feature list is really impressive: https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

Plus, here is the road map with many things already done: https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/blob/master/ROADMAP.md

Wow, wow, wow: Keep up the great work.

One of the rendering engines is Skia by Google. This library is sneaking up fast on us...

WhyNotHugo|2 years ago

iced is a really weird one. It has a lot of widgets and lots of really advanced features... but clipboard support is almost non-existant (basically you can only copy small strings and nothing else). (I also think drag-and-drop is not possible either)

I've wanted to work on a few tiny tools in Rust, but so much of my workflow relies on proper clipboard support that it's never worked out.

Maybe some day I'll have time and energy to work on this, but the issue seem to come from underlying libraries providing abstractions that just don't allow properly inter-operating with the clipboard.

Of course, this isn't a problem for an IRC client, since you can't send images or anything like that anyway.

nu11ptr|2 years ago

It is looking good, but I'm still waiting for a "table" (they do have a "grid" now) and "tree" widget to give it a try

intelVISA|2 years ago

As a fellow Qt fanboi I admit this looks damn good, maybe this once we'll permit a "rewrite it in Rust" moment?

hencoappel|2 years ago

They're also using it for the new Cosmic DE for Pop! OS

TeddyDD|2 years ago

First thing I look at when checking out a new shinny GUI toolkit of the month is whenever it has support for a11y features. In this case, it's not even on the roadmap.

duped|2 years ago

Are they still backed by kraken?

smodo|2 years ago

Man, I wish I still knew people on IRC… Whenever I see a link to Discord I let out a deep sigh. We had it all and we blew it! We threw it all away for gifs and centralization!

So here’s a question: if I download this, what’s a good place to hang out?

PS I’ve never used this Ui toolkit (being an egui man myself) but that panel snapping looks amazing!

542458|2 years ago

> We threw it all away for gifs and centralization!

Simpler configuration, easy voice chat and screen share, simpler administration, user accounts and profile pictures by default, visually appealing and more noob-friendly client, persistent chat history, media embeds, file uploads, rich presence, etc...

distcs|2 years ago

> Man, I wish I still knew people on IRC

IRC is still alive. I still know people on IRC. Most opensource channels have thriving communities on IRC with 100s of regulars logged into the channels everyday. The people I knew in the IRC world in 2010 are still very much there in 2023. The only big change has been that all of us moved away from Freenode over to Libera after the Freenode takeover. And everyone has become older and more mellow and more friendly to beginners.

If you've been away from IRC recently, I urge you to get back to Libera chat network and see for yourself. The IRC world is much better now than it was before.

culinary-robot|2 years ago

Iced is awesome. Slightly biased being a contributed though :) I would recommend https://libera.chat/. There are a ton of great channels: ##rust, #linux, #networking, #security to mention a few.

TkTech|2 years ago

There are many, many IRC networks that are still very active with tens of thousands of active users. Libera.chat is probably the best one I can suggest at the moment for a wide selection of topics. Politics, news, every tech group and subject under the sun, etc...

I've run https://n.tkte.ch/ for the last decade and it's bots are currently connected to over 200 unique, active IRC servers. Still very much alive!

Groxx|2 years ago

And chat history. Chat history is huge. And so is integrated search.

Yeah, you can run a bouncer... but then it depends on that bouncer working, and wtf is a bouncer, why is it necessary, and how do you explain that to normal people? And splits?

IRC is a ridiculous experience comparatively. Its big benefit is that it's super cheap to run.

tcmart14|2 years ago

No kidding. I miss IRC. I still use it, but yea, its mostly silence. About the only time I've seen interaction is on something like #fedora or #freebsd where people just ask support type questions.

mrits|2 years ago

The feeling I got of IRC in the mid 90s is that it was more centralized than it appeared. Most of the server operators hung out in the same channels.

bluejekyll|2 years ago

The simple story here is hosting. Self-hosted IRC while not hard to maintain are not easily discoverable, and ad-hoc communities.

MisterTea|2 years ago

I'm idling on OFTC, Libera and two private servers.

neilalexander|2 years ago

This really is quite beautiful and feels great. It would be super nice if it was possible to control the pane behaviour when selecting channels but it is so refreshing for an application to feel this fast and not be Electron-based.

jakswa|2 years ago

Looks slick for how quickly it was built. I was surprised by the download size and RAM footprint, but... if it was easy to do cross-platform, I'm thinking this is still ahead of electron on footprint? Or at least competitive. Interesting!

tarkah|2 years ago

A lot of the ram usage is actually coming from the wgpu backend. You can use ICED_BACKEND=tiny-skia to try software rendering and the footprint should be a lot smaller.

The footprint should be very consistent throughout the lifecycle of the app. Message history is pretty small and we only keep opened buffers in memory. Everything else is flushed to disk.

Now compared to Electron, there is no comparison for speed and responsiveness

metadaemon|2 years ago

As a suggestion, you might want to modify the default config, I see a lot of people logging into #rust as the `halloy` user.

ComputerGuru|2 years ago

Maybe/at least append an rng value to the end?

halkony|2 years ago

I misread the title and had a mini-heart attack when I thought I was on the front page of HN.

wpwpwpw|2 years ago

Beautiful interface. Nonetheless would be nice to have a linux screenshot on main page.

jeltz|2 years ago

Yeah, I wish there was a Matrix client which was equally beautiful.

qwertox|2 years ago

Which made me look how mIRC is doing:

"mIRC 7.73 has been released! (June 18th 2023)" and runs on Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10/11.

mrits|2 years ago

At age 10 I hopped on every BBS I could that wasn't long distance. Then I did a few free trials of AOL.

At age 12 I got unlimited internet for $20/month where I spent all my free time on mIRC. I learned to code making mIRC bots, then I found eggdrop bots.. Then I had to learn Linux to run them. Before I knew it I was a teenager with better coding knowledge than most of the professionals I knew.

oh_sigh|2 years ago

I wonder how much money Khaled has made over the years from mirc

JimmyRuska|2 years ago

Imagine, someone makes an IRC client that looks like a discord clone, adds some centralized proprietary emoji/background/mini-game features that touches their own servers, and we go full circle back to IRC once discord IPOs.

TeddyDD|2 years ago

There are proposals for ircv3 that aim to add support for custom emoji, reactions, message editing etc. Soju + Gamja + Goguma is pretty usable combo even today.

dethos|2 years ago

It would be nice to have something similar for matrix. I stopped using IRC directly a while ago, and now I rely on matrix to join the channels.

However, to be sincere, I'm not a huge fan of element and this client look great indeed.

Capricorn2481|2 years ago

How was working in Iced? It looks like you did a lot of the work just this month

culinary-robot|2 years ago

This is Iced, not Tauri. Yeah, it's been a productive month. Once you get hooked it's hard to stop.

csomar|2 years ago

I see you didn't publish it to crates.io because of patched dependencies. I registered the "halloy" name so no one else abuses it. Contact me to transfer it to you.

creesch|2 years ago

Upvoted based on the XKCD alone, I used the same argument a few years ago for this spaghetti mess: https://github.com/creesch/discordIRCd

How feature complete is this client? As in what IRC versions (and dialects) are supported?

TingPing|2 years ago

Looks basic, only ircv3 capability is server-time.

AiAi|2 years ago

Looks nice from the GIF. I wish more chat apps had a tiled UI, like mIRC. I use IRC via Matrix/Element, and this is something I miss a lot.

MisterTea|2 years ago

The UI seems to work like the plan 9 Acme text editor (itself based on Oberon). in fact, you can use Acme as an IRC client or mail client.

koito17|2 years ago

Overall looks cool, but how does its implementation of IRC compare to other clients? How about support for extensions like XDCC?

samstave|2 years ago

It shows right there on the page that it embeds XKCD - it even has the IRC comic embedded!

egonschiele|2 years ago

Wow, that logo is gorgeous. Who is the artist?

neilalexander|2 years ago

It's strange to me though that people release new apps on macOS without making the icons conform to the usual shape. Makes applications stand out like a sore thumb on the Dock.

culinary-robot|2 years ago

It's made with the Midjourney niji engine and finished up in Photoshop.

ilrwbwrkhv|2 years ago

+1 would love to work with the artist for my company.

heyarviind2|2 years ago

This looks interesting. I wonder if i can redesign it like GTalk and bring back the old memories :')

georgemoody|2 years ago

That UI simply looks amazing, I might actually consider this once Textual no longer works.

thumbuddy|2 years ago

Is there any way to securely use IRC?