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Basic Commands

Basic commands are the commands you use to get around in pirch.
I'm just going to start off with the really basic ones right now, I'll get into more stuff later.

I'm attempting to make a cheat sheet, if you want it just go here and print it out.

I call any line of text a string, it could be something you type, or it could be a line of stuff in your aliases or events.

If you see anything with my name on it like, /ping bubbett
I'm just showing you what it's supposed to look like, you just use whoever's nickname in place of mine.

Here's a listing of what's on this page:

Action AOL /close Cut and Paste /dns
/join /list Logs /names Notify
/ping /quit Register nick Status Screen /whois
WWW Zoom Channel List

There are two different screens on your Pirch, the first one is called the STATUS SCREEN, this is the first screen you will see, when you logon to a server.
If you look at the bottom of the STATUS SCREEN you'll see a little tab with the address of the server you are on, like neato.ca.us.another.net

This STATUS SCREEN will let you know what's going on behind the scenes, so to speak.

Just click on the little tab at the bottom and you will be able to see what's going on there, I've fixed my windows so my Chat Screen is a little smaller on the bottom, so I have about an inch view of my status screen at all times.

The second screen is your CHAT SCREEN, this is where you do all your chatting.
You won't see this screen until you join a chat room.
At the bottom of the CHAT SCREEN you'll see the tab, it will tell you what channel(room) you are in, like #parentskitchen.

I'm going to be calling channels, chat rooms or rooms in here to make life easier.

One of the important things you can see on the status screen is the listing of chat rooms on the server.
You can view the lists by either typing: /list or clicking on the Channel button.

/list

The /list is one way to check out channels, and join a chat room.
You can either double click on the room you want to go to, or type the name of the room with /j nameofroom
You can only view the list of channels on your status screen.

You can use the button up top called CHANNELS, just click on it, it will give you a listing of all the channels on that IRC server.

If you want to really check out what each channel is about, you can click on the channels button or do /list, look at your STATUS SCREEN, you will see a list of all the channels on the server over on the right side:
1. Highlight one of these channels
2. Do a right click
3. You will see something called "Zoom Channel List"
4. Click on "Zoom Channel List"

What you will see is a listing of all the channels on the server, and the "Topic" of each channel.

To get out of the Zoom Channel List, highlight a channel, and right click, then click on Zoom Channel List.

You can join a channel at any time by just double clicking on the channel you want to go to.

The # in front of a name is the sign for channel, so #parentskitchen would be channel parentskitchen. Channel is just another word for chat room.

There are a few more ways to get into a chat room, once you've found the name of the chat room you'd like to go to, you can do this: (I'm just going to use #parentskitchen as an example):

/j parentskitchen
/join #parentskitchen

Either one of these will work to take you right to the chat room, of course /j parentskitchen is the easiest!

It is possible to join multiple rooms, and multiple servers with pirch, just type /j nameofroom and you'll be in the room you first joined, and in the new room as well. Same with another server, just do another login to whatever server you want. You will see all the names of the servers and rooms on the tabs at the bottem of each screen. I'm not going to get into this because by the time your ready to chat in multiple rooms and servers, you'll have the knowledge to figure it out yourself!

The / followed by a command is how you get Pirch to do different things.
It means you first type the / (forward slash) then the word.

When using the / it's always typed first, you cannot have a string like:
(This will make more sense after you've read more)

Hey /me hi!
It won't work.
/me says /me hi!
Won't work either, the first / command will be run, and the next one will be ignored, so it will just show up on the screen like this:
bubbett says /me hi!

The first thing everyone wants to know is how you can do the light blue text, like:
bubbett says: I live in Connecticut
This is what I typed in the text box:
/me says: I live in Connecticut
This is really very easy, you use: /me

/me will just tell Pirch to put your Nickname and all the rest of the text in light blue, it's called an Action, I guess it's supposed to show your doing something.

/close
This will close out the room you are in, but let you stay on the server if just want to change to another room.

/quit
This will get you out of the room, and off the server.

/dns
DNS is "Display Found Results" which in english means, what's this persons info?
When you do a /dns on someone, you'd type: /dns bubbett (persons nickname)
It will give you back something that looks like this:
Looking up Bridgeport-Usr1-30.nai.net...
Name: Bridgeport-Usr1-39.nai.net
Address: 201.123.162.42
Process Complete
What is all this stuff? It's just the persons ISP info, if you do a /dns on your nickname and it said something like "Cannot find address" it means you either have a bad connection, in which case you should just /quit pirch, and logon again, or your windsock is not able to work with the version of Pirch you are using, if your using Pirch32, you can try the 16bit version, or get a new windsox.

/names
This is used to find out who's in a chat room, you can do this while in your status screen, or when your in a chat room.
You just do /names #thezoo (or the name of the room your interested in)
And if you look on your status screen, you'll see a listing of all the people in that room at that time.

To Ping someone just do:
/ping bubbett (persons nickname)

On your Status Screen you will see the ping response. The Ping Pong thing is just to see how quickly (or slowly) you are receiving info from the IRC Server you are on.
You'll see people asking other people to "Ping" them because they are "lagging"
Lagging is when you are getting big chunks of chat text all at one time, you'll be sitting there wondering why nobody's talking, when all the sudden you'll get this bunch of text scrolling on your screen. It just means your not receiving info from the server as soon as it's put up.
Sometimes leaving the server and logging on again will help, sometimes nuttin will work!
Pinging is not some magic formula that will fix your lag, it's just something to do I guess, I think the longest lag I've seen was something like 312 seconds.

To register your nickname on a server so that noboday else can use it, just type:
/msg nickserv register password
don't type password, just the password you want to use, like if I was registering my nick bubbett, I would type:
/msg nickserv register phone
phone being my password, now everytime I go in to that server, it will say something nasty like:
[NickServ] : Your nickname has been registered. Please IDENTIFY yourself to NickServ to use your nickname.
[NickServ] : Type: /msg NickServ IDENTIFY (your password)
[NickServ] : You have 120 seconds to IDENTIFY or you will be disconnected.

So I would type:
/msg nickserv identify phone
And it will stop saying that nasty message!

There are a few ways to get around typing that message everytime you go on the server, I know I can never remember what the heck to type and I've got so many password floating around in my head by the time I find the right one, I've run outta time!

So you can either make the /msg nickserv identify password (making sure to put your password in where it says password) an Alias or you can put this in your events:
(LawnElf showed me this..works great)

ON NOTICE:You now have 110 seconds to identify*:*:/msg nickserv identify yourpassword
(make sure to put in your password in place of yourpassword!)

Put that in your Events when you go on-line you don't have to do nuttin, it automaticly responds to the server for you!

To copy and paste from the chat screen, or from any of the Event or Aliases or Popup windows:

To cut and paste in the chat screen: Hold down Ctrl and C keys..while highlighting the text, the text you've highlighted will not stay highlighted after you've released the Ctrl & C keys.

To paste in Events, Aliases or Popups, first place the cursor where you want the text to be pasted, then use Ctrl V or right click and you will see the paste command on the menu.

To copy from the Events, Aliases or Popup windows, just highlight what you want to copy, then do a right click, you'll see copy on the menu.

/whois

/whois is a nice little command, you can find out peoples dns stuff, and you can find out where people are. Once you've logged onto a server, just type /whois bubbett (or whoever it is your looking for) if they are on the server look on your Status Screen, you'll see this:

bubbett@Bridgeport-Usr1-14.nai.net * :bubbett
bubbett :#parentsroom
bubbett neato.ca.us.another.net :New/Emerging Applications & Tools Organization
bubbett: 5 seconds idle, logged in at 4/23/97 12:39:37 AM (GMT)
bubbett :End of /WHOIS list.

Now you can find your chat buddies when you can't remember the name of the chat room!!

Notify

If you click on your Pref's button, and click on the tab that says Notify, you can add the names of people you like to chat with. Just keep clicking add, then put the persons nickname in there, when you go on-line the server will tell you if these people in your notify list are on-line.
Then you can do a /whois and find out where they are! LOL
Saves you time looking around for people.

Logs

Logs are pretty cool. A log will make a copy of everything that goes on in the chat room.

If you go up to your Pref's button, and click on the Logs tag, you'll find more stuff to click on!
I filled in all the boxes, you fill in whatever you would like to have logs of, I clicked Never where it says "auto reset logs" cause that means the Pirch will erase the logs, so if you pick daily, it will erase them daily, monthly, will erase monthly.
What I did was make a directory called pirchlogs and at the bottom where it says log directory, I have it go to D:\pirchlogs this way I have a seperate directory for all my log files!
When I want to look at my log files, I just go to windows explorer, find the directory pirchlogs, open it up and double click on the file I want to look at. Or you can open your notepad and go to file...open...and open the directory, whatever!

WWW
Pirch has a neat little thing called the WWW catcher. If someone puts up an http address on the chat screen, the www catcher will "catch" the http address and store it in the List Box so you can check out the page later.

I'm sure you've noticed when somone put's up an http address it's underlined and a color (hypertext links) once you've set up your www catcher, you can click directly on the http address on the chat screen and it will open your browser for you and go to the address!

What you need to do is set up your WWW. Click on the button up top called WWW , click on OPTIONS.
At the top where it say's Browser/Name Location you need to put in the location of your browser.
The best way to do it is browse for it by clicking on the little black arrow looking thing >, it will open another window that says "Locate Web Browser" double click on your hard drive letter (usually C:)
Most people's browsers are stored in the Program Files directory, click on Program Files folder, your netscape might be stored under the Netscape program folder, same with Internet Explorer, would be under the Microsoft Internet.
Basically what your looking for is the .exe file for your browser, you might have the icon of the browser, just click on that in the file.

I have Netscape, in the Browser/Name Location my Netscape .exe file is in this directory:
c:\program files\program\netscape.exe

You want to click the box that says: "Catch URL's from chat"

As new http's get put into your list, they will have an asterisk (*) in front of them, this just shows that the site has not been visited. When you visit a site by double clicking the address, the asterisk will be removed.

So if you click on the box that says: "Purge Unused URL's" it will delete all the http's with the asterisk everytime you close Pirch. I don't have it clicked. Once in a while I go through the list and just delete whatever http's I don't want.

(copied this from the instructions) Web Browser PIRCH supports several major web browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and NCSA Mosaic. PIRCH will attempt to determine which browser your are using when you set the browser name/location, or you can manually tell PIRCH which brand of browser your have. If you are using a browser which does not appear on the drop down list, select the Custom browser and you can manually set the DDE information according to your browsers specifications.

DDE Options By default, PIRCH is setup for using the popular Netscape Web Browser and you should not need to change any of the DDE options. If, however, you use a browser other than Netscape, you will need to change the DDE options as outlined in your browser documentation.

The $url variable in the DDE item field will be replaced with the actual url when an item is loaded. If your browers already open it will just go to the address.

Goto
This button will cause PIRCH to load the web browser and goto the selected web site. Basically the same function as double clicking on a list item.

Add
Select this option to add your own urls to the list.

Remove
Deletes the selected URL from the list.

Options
Select this button for changing your web browser options as outlined below.

So that's about it for the WWW thing. I love it and don't know what I'd do without it!

AOL

To connect to IRC chat from AOL:
First, download a 16-bit copy of pirch.
To connect to IRC chat, the port is 7000.
You can find more help on AOL at keyword: IRC

Action	AOL	/close	Cut and Paste	/dns
/join	/list	Logs	/names	Notify
/ping	/quit	Register nick	Status Screen	/whois
WWW	Zoom Channel List