Colloquy CW Plugin

License

The plugin and its source are released under the BSD 2-clause license. Please refer to COPYING for the full text of the license.

Description

Colloquy CW Plugin is a plugin for the Colloquy IRC client. It converts your chat transcript into Morse code. This allows you to listen to a channel without having to flip over to Colloquy to read the full text. You can also disable the message bubbles once you are confident in your ability to understand the code.

Motivation

I developed this plugin when I started relearning CW. A little practice here and there is good, but I wanted an easy way to weave CW into my everyday life. IRC as Morse code seemed the simplest and most entertaining route.

Installation

To install Colloquy CW Plugin for your user account, run deploy from the repository root directory.

Dependencies

You must have ebook2cw to convert text to Morse code audio. Place a copy in your path, and deploy will find and use it automatically.

ebook2cw was written by Fabian Kurz (DJ1YFK) and is available from its author’s website. A Mac binary is available from http://lategahn.2log.de/index.php?ebook2cw-for-the-mac.

Using the Plugin

Once installed, Colloquy will load the plugin the next time it starts. You can load it sooner by issuing the command:

/fscript load cw

from within Colloquy.

Other commands you may find useful are:

/fscript reload cw
/fscript unload cw

Currently, the plugin cannot be selectively enabled for certain channels, nor can the CW generated be configured without editing the source. To change the CW settings, add the appropriate ebook2cw option flags to the options hash in cw.rb. For example, to set the speed of the generated code to 30 WPM, you would write:

options = {'w' => '30'}

to have cw.rb pass the option -w 30 to ebook2cw.

Future Work

• Tweak the formatting of messages following more usage.

• Route ebook2cw output to /dev/null to clean logs.

• Allow configuring the plugin via /cw commands (/cw help, /cw wpm 30, etc.).

• Allow restricting the CW conversion to certain channels.

• Persist settings.