Add /clear command

[geisesteert]

trafficstars

• add /clear command that wipes/clears the scrollback buffer of current window, like on EPIC/ircii(?)/ScrollZ/mIRC/Irssi/(He)XChat et al.

Reasoning (apart from "other clients have it too"): If you want a clean overview of a new part of the channel conversation, it is nice to be able to remove all the clutter from the previous conversation up to this point. Especially since a certain amount of channel history is kept and being displayed after re-joining a channel. Or, more importantly, if you just communicated state secrets within a channel, or pasted passwords, rocket silo codes, etc. etc.

[MCMrARM]

I'll be adding per-message deletion. Only reason /clear is not happening because currently we have no non-IRC commands in the client and I'm unsure whether I want that to change (I personally think that for client stuff there should be an UI way instead of commands).

[c-sanchez]

Indeed an UI is proper, but the command is good to have too, this can make the things quick/nice for the most "classical" irc users :p

[MCMrARM]

Unfortunately this voids the rule of declarative commands, so not happening now until I change my mind about that,

[cousteaulecommandant]

No need for this to be a command; a UI action to wipe a conversation would cover @geisesteert's use case. But at least have some way to wipe conversations.

[kurahaupo]

@MCMrARM personally I would like to have everything doable from a /command. Most IRC users come from a long tradition of using a command line, and if we want to drive adoption then we need to give users what they expect, not what we think they "ought" to use.

Quite apart from that, I would hate to see space on my tiny screen sacrificed to make room for more widgets, so anything that's UI based is going to need to be in a pop-up menu somewhere, which doesn't make it that much quicker or more convenient than simply typing, especially if one is using a real keyboard (connected by bluetooth).

But on the flip side, I'd like to see as much affordance as possible in the UI:

• tap on a channel anywhere (and get menu with: open, leave, ops, participants, cs-info)
• tap on a nick anywhere, including @word and word: (and get a menu with privmsg, whois. ns-info, quiet, remove, kick, ban, search for messages involving them, etc);
• tap on a message (and get a menu with: reply, copy, show-raw, etc);
• tap on a server anywhere (and get a menu with: [dis]connect, [en/dis]able auto-connect, etc);

If the tap hits two things at once (eg, a nick inside a message) then combine the menus for both.