At-sign nick completion for Weechat and Slack

I like connecting to chat apps like Slack and Flowdock using an IRC client, as that keeps all my chats in one window, right in my terminal.

I’ve been frustrated that the IRC gateways for Slack and Flowdock don’t highlight people based just on their nick the way a typical IRC client does. For example, my IRC nick is “xdg”. In an IRC channel, just saying “xdg: ping” will highlight and beep my terminal. But if I want to highlight “bob” who uses the Slack app, I need to say “@bob: ping”.

Usually, when I highlight someone, I can use tab completion to finish the nick. That’s really handy when I’m talking to my friend “BinGOs”. But if I want to @-highlight him and I type “@Bi”, completion fails.

Since I use Weechat as my IRC client, I whipped up a plugin called atcomplete, which adds an @-prefixed nick for every nick in the nicklist.

With that, I can do “Bi” and get “BinGOs”, or “” again to get “@BinGOs”. And if I do “@Bi”, I get “@BinGOs” right away.

I’ve submitted it to the Weechat scripts page and it might eventually get approved, but it’s available on github now as weechat-atcomplete if people want to try it out. Feedback and patches welcome!