We've mentioned the fact that the GNOME developers are working hard these days on the first maintenance release of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment in several articles published all week.

Numerous core components and applications that are part of the upcoming GNOME 3.18.1 desktop environment have been updated recently, and we wrote several articles about the new features and improvements they bring.

Today we're going to talk a little about the new features implemented in the Polari 3.18.1, GNOME's open-source IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client, dubbed by its developers "It’s Yoghurt. It’s French."

The biggest new feature in Polari 3.18.1 is the addition of support for the new distro-agnostic paste service launched by GNOME’s sysadmin team awhile ago. When users attempt to paste more than 5 lines of text into a chat, the application will automatically paste that text to the new paste service located at paste.gnome.org.

"To ensure that we can use a paste service which is distro-agnostic, GNOME’s sysadmin team has launched paste.gnome.org which is based on Sticky Notes. Polari will paste to this service if you attempt to paste more than 5 lines of text into the chat entry," said Bastian Ilso Hougaard.

Several bugs were fixed

In addition to the new paste service functionality, Polari 3.18.1 has multiple bugfixes, among which we can mention a fix for an ellipsization issue in the user list, better handling of channel names that contain capital letters, the ability to suggest default values for new connections, and sensitive highlighting of room list header on hover.

For GNOME 3.20, the Polari developer promises more new and attractive features, and maybe an improved user interface. Until then, you can check for Polari 3.18.1 in the software repositories of your GNU/Linux distribution or download the sources right now from Softpedia and start compiling the software by hand.