As of July 2023, erc-hl-nicks is now a part of ERC!
It won’t be released bundled with Emacs until version 30.1 but is already in ERC available on the Emacs GNU ELPA repository.
This repo should be considered depricated and will be archived once the next version of ERC is released with Emacs but will be kept “live” for now so the Melpa package isn’t accidentally removed before the new version is released.
Please don’t report issues here for the new version and instead follow the instructions at Getting Help and Reporting Bugs in the ERC manual.
If you’re happy with what you’re using, you shouldn’t. (If it ain’t broke…) BUT, if you are interested in trying something new, here are some things you should know:
- erc-hl-nicks is based on erc-highlight-nicknames, so it will auto colorize nicknames (you don’t have to specify colors)
- erc-hl-nicks will ignore certain characters that IRC clients add to nicknames to avoid duplicates (nickname, nickname’, nickname”, etc.)
- erc-hl-nicks can attempt to produce colors with a sufficient amount of contrast between the nick color and the background color.
Pick your favorite package archive- I do try to keep this package up-to-date on Marmalade and it is also available via Mepla and Melpa-stable.
(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
'("melpa" . "http://melpa.org/packages/") t)
;; Either of these will work, as well.
;; (add-to-list 'package-archives
;; '("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/") t)
;; (add-to-list 'package-archives
;; '("melpa-stable" . "http://stable.melpa.org/packages/") t)
(package-initialize)
Then you can install it:
M-x package-refresh-contents M-x package-install RET erc-hl-nicks RET
Download the source or clone the repo and add the following to ~/.emacs.d/init.el:
(add-to-list 'load-path "path/to/erc-hl-nicks") (require 'erc-hl-nicks)