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Support of AIM protocol for Emacs provided by TNT package. This package implements support for message exchanging and works with chat rooms.

Installation of package

You can download package from it's home page. Installation of package is very simple — just unpack downloaded archive and setup Emacs to use sources. You can do this by putting following commands into Emacs initialisation file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "path_to_tnt_dir")
(require 'tnt)

Working with TNT

To work with AIM from Emacs you need to have account. If you don't have one, then you can register it at AOL's site. The main work with this package go throught key bindings, that are very easy to remember. All commands we can split into several groups, that are described in following subsections.

Connecting, disconnecting and changing of user status

To connect to AIM services you need to execute command tnt-open (C-x t o). For this you need to provide user name and password for your account, and if they accepted, then this command will report, that you connected to service. To avoid entering of password each time, you can set it in variables tnt-default-username and tnt-default-password.1

After connecting, user can do all standard things — receive and send messages, chatting, etc.

To disconnect from AIM you need to run command tnt-kill (C-x t q).

Also user can change it status from Online to Away (and back) with command tnt-away-toggle (or with C-x t A). You can customize message, that will send to users, that try to send you messages when you has Away status.

Messaging

TNT supports two type of messaging — user-to-user messaging and chatting.

For user-to-user communication there is command tnt-im (binded to C-x t i) that sends message to another user. You will asked user name with which you want communicate, and after connecting, new buffer will opened, where you can input your messages and read answers. If user name is saved in your users list, then you can use completion during entering user's name.

To start chatting you need to run command tnt-join-chat (or C-x t j). You wil asked about name of chat room. You can input name of existing chat room, or create new one. If chat room does not exists, then it will created. As for user-to-user messaging, new buffer will created, where all things could be done. To leave chat room you need to run command tnt-leave-chat (C-x t l).

If you receive invitation to chat room, or message from another user, you can accept it with tnt-accept command (C-x t a) or reject it with tnt-reject command (C-x t r) — this can useful when you busy, or doesn't want to chat with some users. If you receive several messages, they are stored in queue and you can move between them with commands tnt-next-event (C-x t n) — to get next message, and tnt-prev-event (C-x t p) — to get previous message.

Misc commands

You can create list of users to input their names quickly. To see current list of users you can use command tnt-show-buddies (C-x t b), and to edit it, use command tnt-edit-buddies (C-x t B). Names from list of users, could be used for completing user names, when this need.

TNT can also work as AIM-to-email gateway. This is very handy, if you want to receive messages from AIM on your email address. You can do this with command tnt-toggle-email (C-x t M). You also need to set two variables tnt-email-to-pipe-to and tnt-email-binary.

If you have several accounts, you can switch between them with tnt-switch-user (C-x t s) command. The command tnt-mute (C-x t m) switch on and off audio signals, that used by TNT to notify user about messages.

Package customisation

You can customise TNT using standard Emacs customisation functions (and of course, with Emacs Lisp). To make customisation you can use command M-x tnt-customize, or M-x customize-group tnt. All settings, that user can modify described in file README that come with TNT package.

Login customisation

TNT allow user to use several accounts simultaneously. Name and password are stored in variables tnt-default-username and tnt-default-password. If you has several accounts, then you can put it into variable tnt-username-alist, that is associative list. But you should care, that these data stored in file as plain text, so your data could be read by other users, if you'll set improper access rights to file with settings.

Audio settings

TNT allows user to customize audio signals, that used for different events. For each of event exist variable with name tnt-beep-on-..., for example tnt-beep-on-incoming-message will be used for notification on new incoming messages. Besides this, you could also specify which program will be used to play these files (variable tnt-sound-exec) and arguments, that will be passed to this program (variable tnt-sound-exec-args).


1. You can also use several accounts. To get more detail information about this, see section about package customization.

Last change: 05.03.2013 16:54

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