Why I don't like dispatch.pl
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I have not developed for irssi for many many years.
A more recent version of scripts may be available at scripts.irssi.org.
The topic of using dispatch.pl
or not keeps coming back on #irssi
, so here's my take on why you should not use it:
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If you type a wrong command (that just doesn't exist anywhere), it takes longer for irssi to figure that out, it has to wait for a reply from the server. If you have 5 seconds lag, you only see after 5 second that the command you just typed wasn't executed.
When i've done a command, I don't wait for such a reply, I just move on to the next thing I want to do. If there was something wrong with the command I want to see it as soon as possible.
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I don't like 'breaking' the protocol. If you make a typo in your mail client it doesn't send non-existing commands to the smtp server. If you mistype a url your browser doesn't violate the http protocol. That just feels wrong. Neither should my irc client (unless I explicitly tell it to, with /quote), and with dispatch.pl, it does.
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Suppose you have a script with a command '/blah <password>' that saves a password in memory, for later use (local, or for a specific server, or whatever). Now suppose you forgot to load the script, and do '/blah myverysecretpassword'. Without dispatch, irssi would just give you an error message. With dispatch it sends your 'sensitive data' (in this case, your password) plain text to whatever server happens to be active. *arrggh* :)
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The commands you use via dispatch can't get tab-completed, which can be a bit confusing, because all other commands do.
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The alternative, '/alias pom quote pom' for every (pom) command irssi doesn't already know, takes less then a minute to set up, and doesn't have any of the above disadvantages
Now, for all the people who don't want these problems, but are too lazy to type a few alias-commands, just paste this in your irssi:
/alias NS nickserv
/alias NICKSERV quote nickserv
/alias CS chanserv
/alias CHANSERV quote chanserv
And if you're an oper:
/alias GLINE quote GLINE
/alias KLINE quote KLINE