Irssi

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Description

irssi is a small command line IRC client based on ncurses. It's a great thing to use when you SSH into a server, or just simply for your main IRC client.

Installation

The install of irssi is pretty straight forward. There are not many USE flags, but one that is worth looking at is the SSL flag. This enables you to use SSL when connecting to servers.

root # echo "net-irc/irssi ssl" >> /etc/portage/package.use
root # emerge irssi

Using irssi

Using irssi initially can be a little intimidating if you're not used to command line programs. To first start irssi, you just simply run:

user $ irssi

There are flags you can pass to the command line while starting irssi, such as:

user $ irssi -n mynick -c irc.freenode.org

This would connect you to Freenode with the nick 'mynick'. Or alternatively you can just run the irssi command and connect via SSL if you need to:

/connect -ssl irc.freenode.org

This will automatically connect you over port 6697.

When you have connected to the server of your choice, you can join a channel simply by:

/j #funtoo

If you want to leave any channel you've entered you can use the part command:

/part #funtoo reasons...

There are a few ways of navigating through your channels, you can use alt+{1-9}{q-p}, or alternatively you can use the window command that is in irssi:

/window 1
/window 2
/window 3

For as many channels you are apart of.

When you're ready to leave, you can simply type in:

/exit

Which will close out connections to the IRC networks you've joined, and take you back to your console window.

Themes and scripts

Scripts

There are a few things you can do to make irssi look a little bit better and add some cool features. There are a few plugins that are pretty useful, such as fnotify.pl which is a script that utilizes libnotify to send you popup notifications for when your nick is pinged or you are sent a private message.

fnotify.pl (perl source code) - fnotify.pl

# todo: grap topic changes

use strict;
use vars qw($VERSION %IRSSI);

use Irssi;
$VERSION = '0.0.3';
%IRSSI = (
	authors     => 'Thorsten Leemhuis',
	contact     => 'fedora@leemhuis.info',
	name        => 'fnotify',
	description => 'Write a notification to a file that shows who is talking to you in which channel.',
	url         => 'http://www.leemhuis.info/files/fnotify/',
	license     => 'GNU General Public License',
	changed     => '$Date: 2007-01-13 12:00:00 +0100 (Sat, 13 Jan 2007) $'
);

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# In parts based on knotify.pl 0.1.1 by Hugo Haas
# http://larve.net/people/hugo/2005/01/knotify.pl
# which is based on osd.pl 0.3.3 by Jeroen Coekaerts, Koenraad Heijlen
# http://www.irssi.org/scripts/scripts/osd.pl
#
# Other parts based on notify.pl from Luke Macken
# http://fedora.feedjack.org/user/918/
#
#--------------------------------------------------------------------

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# Private message parsing
#--------------------------------------------------------------------

sub priv_msg {
	my ($server,$msg,$nick,$address,$target) = @_;
	filewrite($nick." " .$msg );
}

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# Printing hilight's
#--------------------------------------------------------------------

sub hilight {
    my ($dest, $text, $stripped) = @_;
    if ($dest->{level} & MSGLEVEL_HILIGHT) {
	filewrite($dest->{target}. " " .$stripped );
    }
}

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# The actual printing
#--------------------------------------------------------------------

sub filewrite {
	my ($text) = @_;
	# FIXME: there is probably a better way to get the irssi-dir...
        open(FILE,">>$ENV{HOME}/.irssi/fnotify");
	print FILE $text . "\n";
        close (FILE);
}

Irssi::signal_add_last("message private", "priv_msg");
Irssi::signal_add_last("print text", "hilight");

#- end

Another very useful script is for colored nicks, to better tell people apart. Which can be found at irssi scripts called nickcolor.pl.

When you have the scripts you would like you would put them into ~/.irssi/scripts and set a link to ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun.

user $ wget -O ~/.irssi/scripts/nickcolor.pl http://scripts.irssi.org/scripts/nickcolor.pl
user $ cd ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun
user $ ln -s ~/.irssi/scripts/nickcolor.pl .
user $ ln -s ~/.irssi/scripts/fnotify.pl .

You can do this for as many scripts as you've chosen to use. They will automatically load when you start irssi. You can also manually load scripts:

/load ~/.irssi/scripts/fnotify.pl
Irssi: Loaded script fnotify

Whichever works best for you is what you should do.

Themes

You can choose from many themes on the irssi themes page if you don't like the default look of it. Once you've chosen the theme you like, you can simply put it in your ~/.irssi/ directory and when you start irssi simply run:

/set theme mycooltheme

And there you have it, the theme you have chosen is now there.

Conclusion

irssi is a great IRC client, and really helpful if you spend a lot of time in a terminal emulator or on a server.

External Resources

Further documentation

Package:Irssi