Zirconcolors: Color generator for zircon

This page lives at: http://colas.nahaboo.net/zirconcolors

Problem

Zircon Is a tcl/tk IRC client (a worldwide "chat" or "instant messaging" system), having the unique possibility to customize the text attributes (colors, fonts) of messages based on the sender. This makes it very useful for people who, like me, mainly use IRC to chat with a close community of people.

However, customizing messages colors in zircon is cumbersome, as it is done by hand in a X ressource file, that, due to a Tk bad design, must be loaded by xrdb, and cannot be just loaded directly from the file.

Solution

Thus I designed zirconcolors, a set of modifications to zircon that:

make zircon load color setting from a file, not via xrdb
have a menu item to reload the color settings without restarting
do not require patching zircon, to survive version upgrades
generate colors in a logical way (in HSV space) from a terse config file
generate also an html palette page showing colors in use and a sample of possible colors

Ziconcolors

Download:

zirconcolors, a shell (bash) script to install in your PATH
standard.tcl, a zircon add-on to put in your ~/.zircon/look/ directory (create one if needed)

Install:

Create a ~/.zircon/colors file to describe the colors you want to assign to nicknames. You can look at this sample file.
Collect all the X ressources you use in your ~/.Xdefaults file and put them into a ~/.zircon/zircon.ad. You can look at this sample file.
Run zirconcolors. It will modify in place ~/.zircon/zircon.ad to add the colors specified by ~/.zircon/colors
You can preview the colors by opening ~/.zircon/colors.html
Run zircon. The customizations will survive zircon version changes

Then, to update colors, just modify the ~/.zircon/colors files, and re-run zircon.

Manual

zirconcolors -help

USAGE: zirconcolors 

Takes a description of user colors in ~/.zircon/colors and generates color
ressources in ~/.zircon/zircon.ad ~/.zircon/zircon.ad should contain the X
ressources used by zircon that you would normally put in your ~/.Xdefaults,
zirconcolors will add its generated ressources at the end.

The color file consists of line of the form:
    # comments
    color: nicknames                    set nicknames to use color
    background: rrggbb                  set background color of page
    increment: n                        set H increment between colors
where color can be:
    rrggbb
    #rrggbb
    %hhssvv
    colorname
    + or - to specify next tint in HSV space with increment (default 10/255)
        from previous color
        (you can specify the increment, e.g: +23 or -7)
    =xx sets hsv tint (H), keeps SV from previous value (in hex)
nicknames with 1 2 3 and _ __ appended are also used, case insensitive.
An html page is generated as ~/.zircon/colors.html to preview the chosen colors
Options:
    -v   verbose
    -i num   increment of HUE (HSV) between colors by +/_. default: 10
    -bg bgcolor   the background color in rrggbb form

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