BARNOWL(1)

👑 BARNOWL 👑

okay so bestie, gather round, because we're talking about BarnOwl — a tty-based zephyr client, and she is that girl. This is the manual page, BARNOWL(1), from the General Commands Manual, and we're gonna go through the whole thing together. no skimming, no skipping, we read every line like it's a group chat we actually care about 💖

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

barnowl [-n] [-d] [-D] [-v] [-h] [-c CONFIGFILE] [-t TTY] [-s CONFIGDIR]

that's the whole vibe right there. flags in, chaos out. ✨

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

BarnOwl is a fully integrated tty-based instant messaging client. fr fr, fully integrated. she lives in your terminal and she does everything.

Right now she supports AOL Instant Messenger, MIT Zephyr, Jabber, IRC, and Twitter. yes bestie, all of them, at once, in one tty. it's giving main character energy and honestly she earned it 💅

She's curses-based, which means you get that good good terminal UI, and she lets you do emacs-style editing of your outgoing messages, because of course she does. she also uses Perl as her extension and configuration language, so if you're a Perl girlie you are so set 🎀

and the best part? BarnOwl will also run happily without a configuration file. she's low maintenance like that. no config? no problem. she just shows up and slays. 🙈

Once BarnOwl is started, typing h will display a help screen. and typing : enters command mode, which lets you type a BarnOwl command line. so: h for help, : to go full gremlin on the command line. that's the whole control scheme, iconic honestly ⭐

✨ OPTIONS ✨

The following command-line options are available when running BarnOwl (yes, the original said "avilable" — we're keeping the energy, not the typo, don't @ me):

• -n, --no-subs — Do NOT subscribe to zephyr messages on startup. By default, BarnOwl subscribes to the default subscriptions and to anything found in ~/.zephyr.subs. When you use this option, no subscriptions are loaded. none. zero. the subscribe button is unplugged. 💀
• -c, --config-file=FILE — Specify an alternate config file for BarnOwl to use. The config file is an arbitrary Perl script evaluated in the main package, and if it overrides the BarnOwl::startup method, that's the one that gets run when BarnOwl starts. (Compare ~/.owl/startup, which contains BarnOwl commands that are run at startup after the config file is loaded — different file, different moment, don't mix them up bestie.)

By default, BarnOwl uses the first of ~/.owl/init.pl, ~/.barnowlconf, or ~/.owlconf that exists. first come, first served. 👑

• -s, --config-dir=DIR — Specify an alternate configuration directory. By default, BarnOwl uses ~/.owl/. it's her home away from home 🏠
• -t, --tty=TTY — Specify the tty name to use for the zephyr location. tell her which tty you're living in, she'll respect it.
• -v, --version — Print the version number of BarnOwl and exit. short, sweet, informative, then she's out. 🫶
• -d, --debug — Enable debugging. By default, debugging information is placed in /var/tmp/barnowl-debug.PID. so if she starts acting up, that's where the receipts are 📝
• -h, --help — Print command-line option help. the classic. the friend we all need.

ngl, -D shows up in the synopsis but has no entry in the OPTIONS list. we do not question her. we simply note it and move on. 🧚

💜 AUTHORS 💜

Written by Nelson Elhage and Alejandro Sedeno at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Based on Owl by James Kretchmar. absolute legends, all three of them, no cap.

Comments, questions, and bug reports may be mailed to bug-barnowl@mit.edu. she wants your feedback. she wants your bug reports. she wants you to tell her how she's doing 💖

and that's the whole page bestie!! 🌈 this was BARNOWL(1) from the General Commands Manual, dated 24 Jun 2011. go forth, run barnowl, press h, press :, and be the main character of your own terminal. periodt. 💅✨🎀