Heys
[ Author : Barry O Neill (bubble) : 1999]
[ Images : Barry O Neill (bubble) : 1999]


How to send a message to someone's screen on Redbrick


A simple hey

For those normal people out there, who just want to send a normal hey to someone, it's pretty simple.... at the prompt, you simply type...

hey username (hit return)

Now type your message, it can be any length you want... but as a tip, go to a new line frequently by using return, because if you send long lines, it can look very messy on the other persons screen. Short lines look much better, and are easier to read. When you're finished, simply hit return, so you're on a blank line, and press control and d together. You will get a message telling you if the message was sent successfully or not.

To demonstrate, I'll send a hey to myself (yes, I do have friends:P) and also show you what it looks like when someone replies.



A not so simple hey

Now, here's where you can add a personal touch to your heys... for example, here's an example of what heys can look like.



This has been made possible by people such as cthulhu who introduced the option to do this... and pooka, who refined it, and who currently keeps it up to date... any praise for it goes deservedly to them...

So, how do I do that, I hear you ask... Well, you'll be glad to hear it's pretty simple. You add extra options, or 'arguments' as they're properly called to they hey command... The first one is to let you have a title.... From the example above, in order to get the (bubble) title, you use the command

hey -t "(bubble)" username (hit return)

The double quotes are only necessary if you have spaces in the title, but I always use them anyway, so I won't forget.

Then, it's time to set a border. This is done using the -b option. In the example above, the border used '-' for the top and bottom, '|' for the sides, and '+' for the corners. You can actually specify the individual sides and borders. The -b option is followed by a string of 9 characters... the characters represent a particular order.. eg, in the command

hey -b "123456789" username

• 0 = default
• 1 = top
• 2 = bottom
• 3 = right
• 4 = left
• 5 = top left
• 6 = top right
• 7 = bottom left
• 8 = bottom right

The default character is one that will be used if you mess it all up somewhere.. The double quotes again are necessary only if have a space as one of the characters. To get the hey in the example above I used the command

hey -t"(bubble)" -b"o--||++++" helpdesk



I'm not typing that every time!

Yes, I know it's a pain to type every time.... to get around that you alias it to hey. What am I on about? Well I'll tell you how to do it. First of all find out what shell youre using by typing

echo $SHELL

If you use zsh then type

pico ~/.zshrc

If you use tcsh then type

pico ~/.tcshrc

IIf you use bash then type

pico ~/.bash_profile

If you use any other shell, then you should know by now how to edit a text file.... So. what do you do now I hear you speak. Well, in unix there are things called ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES. You can set these to hold certain values. When some programs run, they use the values in specific environment varibles. In hey on redbrick, there are a few that it uses. Below is a table with the lines to stick in your .zshrc, .bash_profile or .tcshrc to set the various envs.

ZSH/BASH:	TCSH:
export HEY_TITLE="(bubble)"	setenv HEY_TITLE "(bubble)"
export HEY_BORDERS="o--||++++"	setenv HEY_BORDERS "o--||++++"
export HEY_WRAP=40	setenv HEY_WRAP 40
export HEY_SUCCESS="Excellent"	setenv HEY_SUCCESS "Excellent"
export HEY_PROMPT="%u %n> "	setenv HEY_PROMPT="%u %n> "

What they are:

• HEY_TITLE = set the title above the hey, same thing that you put after -t on the command line.
• HEY_BORDERS = pretty obvious as well, same thing that you put after the -b on the command line
• HEY_WRAP = pretty useful if you have the bad habit of typing long lines without hitting return. Set it to the max amount of chars, 50 should be fine. Will not break words, it will do proper word wrapping.
• HEY_SUCCESS = you know the little message hey: helpdesk - groovy? well, you can change the groovy bit by setting this to whatever you want.
• HEY_PROMPT = you can have a little hey prompt, for when you're writing heys. You can set it to whatever you like but %u get's replaced by the username(s) you're heying, and %n the number of people you are heying. Like "%u %n> ".
  
  That's really all there is to it! There are a few other bits and pieces that you can do, but that's left down to you to find.