I recently came back to using IRC regularly after my friend and colleague Jochen Liilch migrated his Monospace Mentor community chat from Discord to IRC. It’s been a treat to go back to a simpler chat system paired with modern creature comforts with IRC clients like Halloy after Discord’s flirtations with the collection of IDs of its users. However, a bit of joy that I didn’t expect to rekindle was in Halloy’s customization options, specifically around the ability to play sounds for certain events (like direct messages and mentions).
This time travelled me back to 20 years ago, in the heyday of Instant Messaging being the prevalent digital communication system. Before the days of Twitter, Facebook, and even MySpace, the major Internet media platforms had their own Messengers. AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! had their fiefdoms of the era, and your choice of platform was every bit the holy war as to whether you were a Nintendo or a SEGA kid. However, this was also the era where personalization of software was in its hey day, and messengers were no exception. While all of these clients had some forms of theming and customization, none were more customizable than the multi-client messengers. Gaim (later Pidgin, and apparently, though maybe it’s an April Fools joke, now back to Gaim), Trillium, and Adium are three of the multi-client messengers I used over the years. In addition to allowing me to be amiable to the networks that all my friends used without running multiple separate and bloated (for the era, haha, they pale in comparison to today’s Electron apps) IM clients, I had a single client where every chat, every status icon, and every alert sound were consistent and of my choosing.
Halloy has let me relive this, allowing me to theme my chat windows, and to configure what sounds, if any, play for certain event types. This time around, I built a little sound set using effects from Earthbound. The telephone ring sound when I receive a DM or a mention and the status ailment sound when a critical error occurs are two fun examples that are nostalgic of my childhood and are hallmarks of the awesome sound design of the era. It’s just a little treat, and tickles my brain in a fun way.