2017-07-14 Bitlbee, Twitter, and Bold

I use Bitlbee. It acts as an IRC server and is the gateway to other services that can be understood in terms to nicks and channels. I use it for Twitter, for example. When I connect, Bitlbee fetches a bunch of older Tweets to fill my timeline. Sadly, highlighting is somehow borked as far as Twitter is concerned. What sort of highlighting you ask? Well, IRC has a convention of allowing some control codes to make stuff bold, italic or coloured. Not everybody uses it, but I installed a plugin for my IRC client, rcirc. This plugin seems to be interfering with the display of the Twitter backlog, sadly.

=> Bitlbee | a plugin | rcirc

This screenshot shows the transition between backlog (the bold stuff above) and the “live” messages which are highlighted correctly:

=> Image 1

What’s wrong? What can I do to fix this?

  1. M-: (setq rcirc-debug-flag t)

  1. start bitlbee and rcirc

  1. switch to the buffer *rcirc debug*

  1. take a look at the borked messages

For example (translating the real Control-B to ˆB for you to read):

Proxy Information
Original URL
gemini://alexschroeder.ch/2017-07-14_Bitlbee%2C_Twitter%2C_and_Bold
Status Code
Success (20)
Meta
text/gemini
Capsule Response Time
171.009667 milliseconds
Gemini-to-HTML Time
0.371308 milliseconds

This content has been proxied by September (3851b).