Quassel IRC

Things that should be clickable:

• URLs (via plugin?)
• Nicks (how to recognize? Can we do this by plugin as well?)
• Channels (easy, just check for #)

Additional information:

If we'd like to move stuff out into a plugin, we need to think about how to handle mouse clicks and provide appropriate context menus. Also, where would we put in %DU if needed? Nicks and channel names should not be visually modified, but we'll probably want to mark URLs with a special formatting.

The right stage for parsing for URLs and known nicks should be after passing the string through the style engine (which also means it's the last stage before displaying it, after going through all the plugins as well).

We might want to add a special plugin interface, which can provide an URL matcher plus handler and fitting context menus. Maybe the same even for nicks and channels. At least a plugin could provide additional context menu entries, such as using external tools for a nick or a nick's hostmask, or handle special URLs such as svn:// or whatever.

So for now, I'd suggest the following:
After creating and styling a message, we match for known nicks as well as for channel and URL patterns. This should be enough to set the appropriate range data in StringFormats, and to do underline-on-demand while drawing the chatline. We might use a plugin layer to add additional matches.

Whenever a link is clicked, we check our plugins for actions that they provide for the given type of link, either to show a context menu or to perform a default action.