Bayamo

Bayamo is a braided chat stream viewer. Feed it many disparate chat sources (so long as they're all either IRC or forcibly mashed through IRC gateways), and it will knit them into a single, completely non-interactive text stream.

This is a very early proof-of-concept prototype, shared in the spirit of sharing and not under any assumption that anyone besides the creator might make immediate practical use of it.

You can read an apologia for Bayamo on its creator's blog.

Sample output

A typical minute-long span of typical use, seen in a macOS Terminal window:

Within this sample -- whose IRC nicks have been blotted out for propriety's sake -- we see conversations from two Freenode IRC channels (#macos and #perl), the general channel a private social Slack I inhabit, and the video games discussion channel of IFMud. Four message-sources from three wholly separate networks, but all presented in the same flow from my perspective.

I leave the question of how I access an IRC network, a Slack, and a MUD through a single IRC client as an exercise for the reader.

Requirements

You need to have a copy of the Textual IRC client running on macOS. (I know, right? Prototype.)

As for the required Perl modules: if you enjoy blindly running curl | bash invocations straight off of GitHub README files as much as I do, then you can just do this:

curl -fsSL https://cpanmin.us | perl - --installdeps .

More conservative users can install cpanm manually and then run cpanm --installdeps . instead.

Usage

Configure Textual to log everything, if it is not already so configured. (Look under Textual → Preferences → Adavnced → Log Location.)
Do not configure Textual to format logged usernames and timestamps and such in any way other than its default.

If you're already a Textual user who has customized all this stuff and long since forgotten its factory defaults, this isn't going to work too well. Ha ha! I did mention this was a prototype, right?
Copy conf/bayamo-example.conf to conf/bayamo.conf, and update as appropriate. (See below for the full list
Run it from the command line. You can provide command-line options to override the config file or Bayamo's own defaults. (Example: bin/bayamo --my_nickname=AnnePerkins

Configuration

Each of these can be set as config-file directives, or as command-line options.

config_file Local filesystem path to Bayamo's config file.

Default: [Bayamo's location]/../conf/bayamo.conf
db_file Local filesystem path to Bayamo's database file. If it doesn't exist, Bayamo will create it, so long as it can write to the enclosing directory.

Default: [Bayamo's location]/../db/bayamo.db
log_dir Local filesystem path to Textual's top-level log directory.

Default: [Bayamo's location]/../log/
my_nickname If you define this, then Bayamo will try to detect channels you're actively engaged in, and not display any text from them for a while.

No default value.
seconds_to_pause The length of time, in seconds, that Bayamo will ignore a channel after you yourself say something inside it.

Default: 600
text_color The six-character hexadecimal RGB code that Bayamo should use for message text display (versus channel and nick display).

Default: 000000
json If invoked, then Bayamo outputs JSON instead of ANSI-formatted text. "This is an experimental feature", he said, not wanting to document it further at this time.

Project status

I have no idea what Bayamo wants to be yet. It probably doesn't just want to be a short script that works with a very specific IRC client setup and then just prints to STDOUT.

I think this is an idea with legs, and I look forward to seeing where it walks me. I shall update this repository when appropriate.

Blame

Jason McIntosh (jmac@jmac.org, GitHub: jmacdotorg, Twitter: @jmacdotorg) created this tool. Questions, comments, et cetera to him. Pull requests always welcome. Thanks!

jmacdotorg / bayamo