Welcome to BarnOwl

BarnOwl is a curses-based IM client forked from the ​ktools owl project. BarnOwl currently supports Zephyr, AIM, Jabber, IRC, and Twitter and aims to be easily extensible and customizable through a Perl plugin interface.

BarnOwl News

• February 28, 2017: BarnOwl 1.10 released. Download it here, or read the release notes or ChangeLog.
• December 02, 2013: BarnOwl 1.9 released. Download it here, or read the release notes or ChangeLog.
• March 14, 2012: BarnOwl 1.8.1 released. Download it here, or read the release notes or ChangeLog.
• October 11, 2011: BarnOwl 1.8 released. Download it here, or read the release notes or ChangeLog.
• February 06, 2011: BarnOwl 1.7.1 released. Download it here, or read the release notes or ChangeLog.
• January 20, 2011: BarnOwl 1.7 released. Download it here, or read the release notes or ChangeLog.
• Jul 27, 2010: BarnOwl 1.6.2 released, fixes CVE-2010-2725. Download it here, or read the release notes or ChangeLog
• May 24, 2010: BarnOwl 1.6.1 released. Download it here, or read the release notes or ChangeLog
• May 08, 2010: BarnOwl 1.6 released. Download it here, or read the release notes or ChangeLog
• March 02, 2010: BarnOwl 1.5.1 released, fixes CVE-2010-0793. Download it here, read the announcement or see the ChangeLog
• December 31, 2009: BarnOwl 1.5 released. Download it here, or see the ChangeLog
• See OldNews for old announcements.

Exploring BarnOwl

• Download BarnOwl!
• GettingStarted with BarnOwl on Athena
  • Getting help from the BuiltinDocs
  • Some UsefulCommands
  • Using encryption in BarnOwl (aka zcrypt)
• BarnOwl Plugins
  • How to install a plugin
  • Get a list of existing plugins
  • Creating your own
• Customizing BarnOwl
  • Creating Filters
  • Setting Keybindings
  • ColorUtils makes it easy to configure colors
  • For jervt users: VtStyle
  • Overriding existing functions
• For current or potential developers:
  • Get the ​source
  • Contributing to BarnOwl
  • Looking for ideas for what to work on or want to suggest a feature? Check out the bugtracker or our ​UserVoice forum.
  • New developers may wish to look at StraightforwardTickets for good places to start
  • BarnOwl's code review policy
• Other miscellany
  • Some ​slides I wrote on hacking barnowl
  • Snappy answers to stupid questions: a UserFAQ created in penance for asking an unnecessary question on zephyr.

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