weechat: Word-of-mouth testimonials

weechat users have been biting their nails literally for years, waiting for this moment to roll around. Well, you can all stop e-mailing me about the wondrous goodness that is weechat: Your moment has come.

 

But now, after the long list of chat clients that have graced these pages, I’ll be honest and say I don’t quite recall what the hubbub was about.

“wee” to me, is a word that means small or tiny, and so perhaps weechat is a good deal smaller than the garden-variety irssi?

Not according to the ancient and revered ps_mem.py script. In fact, it’s quite the opposite situation at a cold start.

kmandla@6m47421: ~/temp$ sudo python ps_mem.py 
[sudo] password for kmandla: 
 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used	Program 
...
  1.5 MiB +   1.1 MiB =   2.6 MiB	bash (4)
  2.0 MiB +   1.0 MiB =   3.0 MiB	irssi
  3.4 MiB + 610.5 KiB =   4.0 MiB	mc
...
 10.8 MiB +   2.3 MiB =  13.1 MiB	openbox
 14.2 MiB +   1.0 MiB =  15.2 MiB	weechat
 46.1 MiB + -23103.5 KiB =  23.5 MiB	Xorg
...
---------------------------------
                        497.6 MiB
=================================

(I abbreviated a little bit there, just to save widescreen visitors the pain of constant scrolling. 😆 )

So if memory profile is not the appeal, is it extensibility? The list of features on the weechat site is quite lengthy, and some of them — like vertical splits and spellchecking — are appealing even to me.

If it’s not that, then there’s only one thing that I can see outright that might swing me over to weechat, if I were mired in irssi … more color. 😉 😀

But I’ll let you decide. Chat clients have reached a saturation point, and unless you need something extremely specific, many of them seem to be duplicating efforts. To my untrained eye, that is.

That does mean you have plenty to choose from though. And having a choice is always a good thing. 😉