Implement MSN Plus! features

[amroth]

MSN and WLM are often not used alone by themselves; many people will install an add-on, "MSN Plus!" ( available at  http://www.msgpluslive.net/ ), which enhances the MSN experience with a lot of new features.

One of them is coloring nicknames (and text messages, too) by usage of text formatting tags: IRC-like style (·#bold·0), or BBCode-like style ([b]bold[/b]).

I've implemented a first approach at this one problem. The patch I've attached here is able to parse codes in chats (both in friendly names and text messages) and in the contact list (only the friendly names, not the contacts' personal messages). Parsing the codes can be independently enabled using two checkboxes in the Chatting Settings - they aren't enabled by default. When they are disabled, the codes are only stripped away from the nicknames and messages.

The patch also contains a modified version of the Chatting Settings which uses tabs to separate different kinds of chatting options. That modify was required to make room for the two new options. I'll post in a separate ticket the modified page alone, to see if it's worth implementing it alone and separately from this patch.

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The MsnPlus patch needs A LOT more optimization: the patch at the moment makes KMess quite heavier in terms of CPU time, since it makes wide use of regular expressions. Still I've already optimized it a lot, it doesn't parse strings which don't contain formatting codes, and caches the last 100 formatted strings to avoid formatting them again soon.

A future optimization will be cleaning tags from strings without using regular expressions; and maybe, avoid parsing formatted nicknames if the two new formatting options are turned off. Two things that would make KMess very close to the current SVN revision.

Here is the current memory footprint: kmess-current is the patched KMess, kmess-svn is revision 2015 as in the repo.

big account: 160 contacts in friend list, ~250 in all lists

 7582 amroth    15   0 73636  39m  20m S  0.0  3.9   0:08.01 kmess-current
 5907 amroth    15   0 73784  39m  20m S  2.3  3.9   0:05.95 kmess-svn

73636/73084 (kb) is the "Virtual Image size", the total amount of virtual memory used by the task. It includes all code, data and shared libraries plus pages that have been swapped out.
39m is the "Resident size", the non-swapped physical memory a task has used.
20m is the "Shared Mem size", the amount of shared memory used by a task. It simply reflects memory that could be potentially shared with other processes (for example, the Qt's libraries are shared between all KDE and Qt apps).

small account: 4 contacts in friend list, ~10 in all lists

 4778 amroth    15   0 67476  30m  18m S  0.0  3.0   0:02.80 kmess-current
 4788 amroth    15   0 67164  30m  18m S  0.0  3.0   0:01.21 kmess-svn

Same fields apply here,
67476/67164 Virtual Image size
30m Resident size
18m Shared Mem size

Discuss!

[amroth]

First revision of MSN Plus! patch

[amroth]

MSN Plus! support patch, updated at september 2, 2007.

[amroth]

Updated as of 2007-11-25

[valerio]

First version of this patch for KMess2.0

[valerio]

Fixed with a lot of commits: r3267, r3352, r3354, r3355, r3356, r3357, r3360, r3372, r3373, r3374, r3376, r3378, r3380, r3381, r3392. And probably others.