user guide

LeechCraft has a whole lot of great modules that can gain and hold their audience, but one of the most prominent plugins is possibly Azoth, the IM client.

Like LeechCrat itself, concrete features in Azoth are implemented via subplugins, while Azoth core only implements the core GUI and several other things that are interesting only to programmers. One should first decide what plugins he wants. Of course, it is possible to just install all the available plugins and then disable (or just ignore) some of them, but it still may be important to consider the ones most relevant to this guide. The plugins are split into three groups according to the author's own preferences.

The most important ones are:

• LeechCraft — the LeechCraft core;
• AdvancedNotifications — the primary notification management module, for example, providing tray notification icon about unread messages; supports flexible notification rules;
• Azoth — IM core;
• Azoth Acetamide — IRC protocol support;
• Azoth Autopaste — half-automatic pasting of long texts to pastebins;
• Azoth Chathistory — plugin for storing and displaying conversations history;
• Azoth Rosenthal — spellchecker for outgoing messages;
• Azoth Standardstyles — support for native LeechCraft themes — simple, elegant and fast;
• Azoth Vader — support for the mail.ru protocol;
• Azoth Velvetbird — wrapper for supporting libpurple protocols;
• Azoth Xoox — one of the most complete implementations of the XMPP (Jabber) protocol out there;
• Kinotify — platform-independent visual notifications (sysnotify module could be installed instead for notifying via desktop environment);
• Pogooglue — support for searching for the selected text in search engines;
• Secman — password storage module;
• Secman Simplestorage — one of the implementations of password storage backend;
• TabSessManager — plugin for recovering opened tabs on startup and unclosing tabs.

One could also recommend the following:

• Auscrie — plugin for making screenshots and uploading them to imagebins;
• Azoth Adiumstyles — support for Adium chat styles;
• Azoth Astrality — support for protocols provided by the Telepathy framework, for now only basic IM features are supported;
• Azoth Autoidler — automatic status changing according to user activity;
• Azoth Depester — support for ignoring users in conferences;
• Azoth EmbedMedia — showing images, Youtube videos etc. into chat window on link click;
• Azoth Herbicide — SPAM filter;
• Azoth NativeEmoticons — smiles support;
• Dolozhee — client for LeechCraft issue tracker for submitting bug reports and feature requests in a few clicks;
• Liznoo — integration with system services for properly supporting sleep and hibernate modes, as well as some fancy things for notebook users;
• New Life — import settings and history from other clients;
• CSTP — support for the http(s) protocol, is used in the Lackman plugin and similars;
• Dumbeep — sound notifications (one could use LMP module instead if one needs a media player as well);
• Lackman — userspace package manager for LeechCraft, allows installing additional chat themes, smiles, iconpacks, etc.

It is also worth noting these plugins:

• AnHero — crash handler for KDE;
• Azoth BirthdayNotifier — notifications about birthdays of users from the contact list;
• Azoth HiLi — additional options for configuring highlights in conferences;
• Azoth LastSeen — local tracker of buddies activity;
• Azoth p100q — integration with the psto.net microblogging service;
• Azoth SHX — shell commands executor supporting pasting command output to the chat;
• Azoth Xtazy — publishing (unobtrusive as well) the information about current tune if the player supports MPRIS (or if LMP is used);
• Glance — быстрый компактный обзор всех открытых вкладок;
• NetStoreManager — provides support for cloud storage services, in Azoth context it is useful for file transfers;
• NetStoreManager GoogleDrive — Google Drive backend for NetStoreManager (registration is required);
• Pintab — support for tabs pinning;
• Poshuku — LeechCraft web browser, is used in Lackman for fancy themes information displaying;
• SB2 — dock panel with support for various quarks (similar to widgets or plasmoids in other environments) like for switching between tabs, quickly enabling or disabling sound notifications or display file transfer status via the TPI module (this module may be unstable on some systems due to untested Qt features);
• Summary — plugin for displaying background activity of other plugins, may be used instead of SB2 + TPI as it can, for example, display unread news in news aggregator as well;
• TabsList — yet another implementation of fast tabs switching, more keyboard-oriented.

Plugins packages are usually prefixed with leechcraft-, like leechcraft-azoth or leechcraft-netstoremanager-googledrive.
If package manager of your distro doesn't have such a rich set of LeechCraft packages, don't worry: subplugins (leechcraft-X-Y) are likely bundled with the corresponding first-level plugins, like leechcraft-azoth.

Some notes

LeechCraft doesn't work with Cygwin GnuPG. Instead it works with native GnuPG build. If you understand the difference you probably already have the right version.

Prerequisites

Later LeechCraft builds for Windows support message encryption, particularly via XMPP (the XEP-0027). Native GnuPG build called Gpg4win is required for this to function properly. Gpg4win can be obtained here.

After installation you need to generate a pair of keys — public and private (secret) ones. Your public key will be used by others to encrypt messages addressed to you, which could be decrypted by you using the private key. For this one can use the GNU Privacy Assistant application from Gpg4win. After keys are generated you need to give your public key to your chat buddies.

You can also add public keys of your chat buddies using that same program, GNU Privacy Assistant. This is needed for LeechCraft to encrypt messages you write. Ask your buddies to send you their public keys via any method convenient to them, from email to XMPP file transfer.

After you've generated your keys and imported public keys of your contacts, LeechCraft needs to be configured for this to work.

Configuring LeechCraft

Incoming messages decryption

Open LeechCraft settings: Main Menu → Settings → Azoth.
Select account you wish to configure and press the PGP... button on the right. Select your private key in the drop-down list which will be used to encrypt incoming messages and press OK. Then press Apply for settings to take effect.

Outgoing messages encryption

Each user can be assigned with a public PGP key, which will be used for encrypting the messages for that user.

For assigning a public key, you need to:

1. Right-click the user in Azoth roster.
2. Select Manage PGP keys... in the context menu.
3. Choose the public key for the contact and press OK.

Using encrypted messaging

One can enable or disable message encryption before sending the message.

To toggle the encryption, one needs to press the Enable encryption button in the chat tab's toolbar (a lock is drawn on it). After that all your messages will be encrypted with the chosen public key for that contact, and the other part will be able to read the messages only if it has the corresponding private key. It's up to the other party, though, whether to send you back encrypted or plain messages.

If something goes wrong, the button won't be enabled and you'd get an error message instead.

Also, LeechCraft automatically enables sending encrypted messages if it receives an encrypted message from the other part and a public key for it is set.

Troubleshooting

There is an excellent page about common problems and their solutions on the Psi IM project page here.

Azoth is our modular IM client supporting a bunch of protocols, with quite good support for XMPP, in particular. Its features and highlights are documented on this page.

Poshuku allows one to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page contents via the Poshuku FatApe plugin. These scripts could be used for adding new features to web pages (for example, embedding price comparisons within shopping sites), fixing rendering bugs, combining data from multiple webpages, and numerous other purposes.

This chapter documents how userscripts could be installed and how they could be edited and managed.

Installing userscripts

We will consider the Userscripts.org site here. Installation process is similar for other sites.

Let's navigate to the site and pick a userscript for installation, for example, this one. Click the Install button:

After that, FatApe's dialog will pop up with some information about the script (the domains where it is enabled or explicitly disabled):

You can view the script sources to ensure it doesn't do anything malicious, or you can just click Install to install it. That's basically it, the script is installed now. If you have any pages open that should be working with the just installed script, just reload them.

Managing userscripts

Open FatApe settings. There you can either disable/enable the installed userscripts, remove them or edit them. Editing requires entering the path to a text editor at the bottom.