Kirk

Another IRC client & UI, because Irssi is great but painful to script. gawel/irc3 works, but its design flaws are limiting and hard to work around. jaraco/irc is weirdly over-engineered while making seemingly simple things very hard.

This is a minimalistic, portable, yet almost complete rfc2812 implementation (~600 LOC client, ~400 LOC UI), which I should have written years ago, instead of fighting above tools.

UI features

• Irssi inspired UI (powered by blessed ♥️)
• Colorized nicks
• MIRC color/formatting
• Tabbed layout (ARROW_LEFT, ARROW_RIGHT)
• Scrollable buffers (PAGE_UP, PAGE_DOWN)
• Multi-server enabled (switch through with /s)

Client features

• Fully asyncio
• Implements most of rfc2812
• Symmetric E2E encryption with cryptography.Fernet (Kirk exclusive feature)
• Auto-join
• Auth support (via NickServ)
• CTCP support
• DCC support
• SSL support
• Super easy to extend and adapt!

Demo

Super simple IRC bot ollama_chatbot.py that reacts to private messages. Uses a locally running ollama LLM.

Running it

By default, Kirk will look into the user's home directory for a startup config file. This is just a convenience. Running it yourself is also easy, see run.py.

Start UI

python -m kirk.run

Non-exhaustive example for config file ~/.kirk.toml

[kirk]
# save buffer history on exit and load on start
persistence = false
# Custom IrcClient class that Kirk should use instead.
# client_class = "some.import.path"

[[kirk.client]]
host = "irc.libera.chat"
nick = "Uhura"
auto_join = [
    "#testchannel",
]
ssl = true
# Optional: AuthServe authentication
auth = "YOURPASSWORD"
# Symmentric encrpytion with peer. Both need the same key
# Key generation: base64.urlsafe_b64encode(os.urandom(32))
keys.CpnKirk25 = "R3k4JBrPet51XYzkD64KNeuOljzANxBT6yIHZT-yY7w="
# Use "console" with headless and "file" or "none" for Kirk
log_mode = "none"

# another server
[[kirk.client]]
# ...

Running it manually

import asyncio

from kirk.client import IrcClient
from kirk.kirk import Kirk

async def main() -> None:
    loop = asyncio.get_running_loop()
    client = IrcClient(
        host="irc.libera.chat",
        nick="YourName",
    )
    kirk = Kirk([client], loop)
    # UI is select()-based, so run in a separate thread
    _ = loop.run_in_executor(None, kirk.run)
    # start the actual client
    await asyncio.gather(client.run())


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main(), debug=False)