Mcabber notifications

From awesome

Mcabber is a great console based xmpp client with e2e (pgp and otr). By default the only way to see that you got a new message is the urgent hint set by mcabber and shown by awesome if configured correctly. I used gajim before and liked the notifications via naughty. This text is about enhancing your mcabber and awesome to inform you about your latest chat messages and status changes of your contacts. So lets get naughty ;)

[edit] mcabber configuration

mcabber has support for an external hook invoked if something happened. We use this for our notification. The relevant parts are the following:

set events_command = ~/.mcabber/event.sh
set events_ignore_active_window = 0
set event_log_files = 1
set event_log_dir = /tmp

As you can see we need a shellskript wrapper that pushes the bits to awesome.

~/.mcabber/event.sh

#!/bin/sh
echo "mcabber_event_hook('$1', '$2', '$3', '$4')" | awesome-client

Just an information about security. The shellscript above can easily be exploited locally e.g.:

./event.sh "');awful.util.spawn('xterm'); --"

However the data sent by mcabber cannot contain the tick char (') that would be needed for this exploit. The only possible data chunk may containing illegal data would be the node of the jid, but again the tick char is forbidden.

Anyway if you really dont trust incoming data you could replace the tick char everywhere with a sed command e.g.

echo "mcabber_event_hook('`echo $1 | sed -e "s/'/_/g"`', ...

[edit] awesome configuration

Next you have to set up your rc.lua

First add the profiles for status changes

naughty.config.presets.online = {
    bg = "#1f880e80",
    fg = "#ffffff",
}
naughty.config.presets.chat = naughty.config.presets.online
naughty.config.presets.away = {
    bg = "#eb4b1380",
    fg = "#ffffff",
}
naughty.config.presets.xa = {
    bg = "#65000080",
    fg = "#ffffff",
}
naughty.config.presets.dnd = {
    bg = "#65340080",
    fg = "#ffffff",
}
naughty.config.presets.invisible = {
    bg = "#ffffff80",
    fg = "#000000",
}
naughty.config.presets.offline = {
    bg = "#64636380",
    fg = "#ffffff",
}
naughty.config.presets.requested = naughty.config.presets.offline
naughty.config.presets.error = {
    bg = "#ff000080",
    fg = "#ffffff",
}

After that we add the function that handles the mcabber hook events. You have to change the variable "muc_nick" if you want awesome to hide your own MUC messages but only incoming messages.

muc_nick = "your_muc_nickname"

function mcabber_event_hook(kind, direction, jid, msg)
    if kind == "MSG" then
        if direction == "IN" or direction == "MUC" then
            local filehandle = io.open(msg)
            local txt = filehandle:read("*all")
            filehandle:close()
            awful.util.spawn("rm "..msg)
            if direction == "MUC" and txt:match("^<" .. muc_nick .. ">") then
                return
            end
            naughty.notify{
                icon = "chat_msg_recv",
                text = awful.util.escape(txt),
                title = jid
            }
        end
    elseif kind == "STATUS" then
        local mapping = {
            [ "O" ] = "online",
            [ "F" ] = "chat",
            [ "A" ] = "away",
            [ "N" ] = "xa",
            [ "D" ] = "dnd",
            [ "I" ] = "invisible",
            [ "_" ] = "offline",
            [ "?" ] = "error",
            [ "X" ] = "requested"
        }
        local status = mapping[direction]
        local iconstatus = status
        if not status then
            status = "error"
        end
        if jid:match("icq") then
            iconstatus = "icq/" .. status
        end
        naughty.notify{
            preset = naughty.config.presets[status],
            text = jid,
            icon = iconstatus
        }
    end
end

As you can see I use the gajim icons for the notifications, you may also want to use them. In the script above I also match for "icq" which is my icq transport, so the icq icons will be used but not the xmpp ones.

[edit] Icons

Add this to your rc.lua

naughty.config.icon_dirs = { os.getenv("HOME") .. ".config/awesome/naughtyicons/",  "/usr/share/pixmaps/" }

Create the directory ~/.config/awesome/naughtyicons/ extract the contents of the tarball there.