jargonaut the new Linux Mint chat app
At the beginning of February Patrick Griffis (aka “Tingping”), known for his work on many open source projects (GNOME, Flatpak, Gnome-MPV, Meson, etc.), announced in a blog post the announced the end of the Hexchat project.
The person in charge of HexChat lreleased version 2.16.2, moved the repository to an archived state and announced that the project would not receive any further maintenance. This decision is due to lack of support from people willing to contribute to the project, due to time constraints and lack of interest in continuing its development by the current maintainer.
Faced with this decision After finishing the development of Hexchat, the guys at Linux Mint did not let this news go overlooked and took a step forward by announcing the development of a novel application called Jargonaut, which seeks to offer a simplified chat experience based on the IRC protocol, although it is not classified as a conventional IRC client.
What is Jargonaut?
Jargonaut is an easy-to-use chat app that offers an intuitive interface so that users can chat, extracting the essential functionalities of IRC. The interface is built using the xapp library, which provides a set of elements for GTK to unify the user experience in various environments such as Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce.
As already mentioned, the reason for starting the development of a new chat application arose due to the discontinuation of the HexChat IRC client, which was previously integrated into the main Linux Mint distribution and which the developers consider it essential for the distribution to have with a chat application.
On Linux Mint, Hexchat has been the default IRC client since 2014.
Before that, Linux Mint came with Xchat, which Hexchat was based on. I can't remember the last time we shipped without an IRC client, if we ever did. In the future, since Hexchat is discontinued, we should remove it from the default selection or replace it with another application.
Hexchat has been rock solid, but we've been thinking about replacing it for a couple of years. We didn't know it was going to be discontinued, but we faced two growing problems.
Given this situation, the developers of Linux Mint saw an opportunity to realize their vision of what a lightweight communication application should be like. Continuing development of HexChat within Linux Mint was considered inappropriate, especially since porting the application to GTK3 to support high-resolution displays would require significant effort.
Hexchat was a great IRC client that helped us create a relatively good support chat room. We hope Jargonaut will help us make this chat room even better and much easier to use.
Therefore, It was decided to create Jargonaut, a new application that uses modern technologies and incorporates the ideas and features that developers want to implement. Planned improvements to Jargonaut include support for the Pastebin service, the ability to embed images via Imgur, bug reporting, and other features that go beyond traditional IRC capabilities.
At part of the improvements that are planned for the future, the following are mentioned:
- Ability to ignore users (probably means we also need a unique way to identify them)
- Don't auto scroll if the scrolled view is not at the bottom
- Improve autocomplete for nicknames (should work at least when you say hello...)
- Wait for view to load before auto scrolling
- Make not exiting when closing the window optional
- Load-dependent functions
- Add inxi automation
- Add DND image
- Add pastebin/imagebin buffer
finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, You should know that the project is written in Python and is distributed under the GPLv2 license. You can check the details In the following link.