Back to irssi
September 16, 2009 – 8:18 amDear mom and dad: I apologize in advance for this post probably not making any sense. Basically, there are some programs that I used back in high school that I still like and am going back to use again now. If you (or anyone else) have questions about the stuff I’m talking about here, please ask! A couple of potentially handy links: irssi, XChat, Linux, Thunderbird, quicktext, mutt, vim, emacs.
My first IRC client was irssi. I switched to XChat in college when I was helping friends get started with Linux because I wanted to dogfood the applications I was recommending to them, but the lure of always-on-ness with screen and the simplicity of the terminal was too strong; I switched back this week at Karsten’s suggestion.
And I’ve got questions.
- What plugins do people recommend? (I have none installed at present.)
- Is there a way to make your terminal flash a notification in your taskbar (or otherwise somehow notify you visually outside the terminal window itself) when a message directed at you arrives? One of the nicest things about XChat was the flashing icon that would appear when I was working on something else while waiting for a particular urgent ping to interrupt me.
- For those of you who use irssi in a terminal running in your window manager and regularly have more than 11 channels open at a time, what do you do about the alt-W through alt-T irssi channel-switching keyboard shortcuts being overridden by GNOME (or whatever) shortcuts for the Tools, etc. drop-down menus? Is there a way to override this, or a better one-shortcut way of getting to channels 12-15?
- For those of you who regularly have more than 20 channels open at a time, is there an easier way of getting at channel, say… 31, than going to channel 1 and then ctrl-P(revious)-ing back until you reach it?
- It seems like there is a way, based on highlighted messages and funneling them to one window, to capture only the stuff sent to you while you were out, so you can quickly read scrollback. I haven’t played enough to figure that out yet.
- other irssi best practices (or rather, “handy habits that workforme and that I recommend”)?
Heh – before you know it, I’m going to be using mutt and vim again instead of Thunderbird and gEdit. (The switch to mutt depends on finding a good way to replace Thunderbird’s quicktext plugin, but I suspect there’s some way to kludge a vim macro to do the trick; if not, there must be a way in emacs, and I can just learn that.)
7 Responses to “Back to irssi”
Plugins: I use just one, adv_windowlist.pl from here:
http://anti.teamidiot.de/static/nei/*/Code/Irssi/
It gives a nice statusbar that has information on activity/window number for all channels you’ve joined.
Notifications: lmacken and thl have both written notification scripts for irssi in the past; see:
http://lewk.org/blog/irssi-notify
http://thorstenl.blogspot.com/2007/01/thls-irssi-notification-script.html
Window switching: In lieu of Alt-X you can do Esc, X – i.e. hit Escape then 3 to switch to window 3. adv_windowlist makes this easier, since you have an on-screen list of all the numbers for each channel.
Many windows: The irssi window list assigns unique letters for each window, even beyond 10 – so window 11 is ‘q’, for example. With adv_windowlist the status bar should show the letter assigned to each window, but I’m pretty sure it goes along the keyboard – i.e. 123..90, qwe..op, asd..
Capturing only important messages while away: use /away and every message that mentions your nick (or anything else you’ve set with /hilight) will be displayed in the status window when you come back. Yay! You can also use /lastlog to summarize one window, e.g. “/lastlog jetpacks” would show all mentions of jetpacks in the scrollback for the current window.
Hope that helps!
By wwoods on Sep 16, 2009
I’ll get back to you on plugins
Set irssi to beep the terminal under certain conditions, such as certain levels of messages, then set your terminal to flash in the taskbar on beeps. Personally i think it’s annoying.
In gnome terminal, you can disable all keyboard shortcuts, which are annoying anyways. You can also remap any key inside irssi to an action, so you can just skip those keys if you need those keyshortcuts.
I have an alias /g for /window go, so /g 32 will go to window 32. Depending on your extensions, this might be native in irssi, i forgot, you can also do /g #some-channel.
You can have your away log capture all highlights, and then when you sit down to your computer, disabling away will make the scroll back flash by. If irssi crashes, or your shell server goes down, the awaylog can also be saved to disk. I also make my highlights highlight the entire line rather than just the highlight itself. This way i can spot it faster while scrolling back.
Other tricks, you do know to keep it behind screen, so you can run it forever? If you do, we should do a fedora-idlerpg game. It seems like your style thing.
By loupgaroublond on Sep 16, 2009
What are you using quicktext for? If it’s just expansion of fixed text, put this in ~/.vimrc
:ab _hth Hope this helps,
(etcetera)
_hth (not in vim at the moment),
James.
By James on Sep 16, 2009
Some irssi answers:
- Plugins: The only plugin I use is twirssi, which is a twitter & identi.ca client.
- Windows 11-19: I always disable the gnome-terminal menu bar (or use something other than gnome-terminal…) which prevents it from grabbing those keys.
- Logging while away: Use ‘/away (away message here)’ to set yourself away and just ‘/away’ on its own to come back. Anything sent to you or that contains your nick will be printed in window 1.
- Other tricks:
* use ‘/lastlog (word)’ to see the last time anyone said that word or use someone’s nick to see when they last spoke. Use ‘/lastlog -clear’ to clear any lastlog output and return your window to sanity.
* use ‘/layout save’ to save window positions so the next time you start irssi the same channels/people get placed in the same windows as before.
* Alt-A will take you to a window with unseen activity. It prioritizes private messages over normal channel activity. This might help with the ‘more than 20 windows’ problem as well.
By David on Sep 16, 2009
Plugins, I use the “spellcheck” script so that I can get help spelling words. A bit annoying how it spews in the window when you misspell a word but worth saving the embarrassment. For notification I use notify.pl, which uses the dbus notification system (like when you type “notify-send foobar”). You get a popup in the notification area of your gnome panel. I’ve modded it a bit to also play a sound via paplay.
Like the others, I disable the menu in gnome-terminal, and I use it in screen. I also use it with a proxy server so that it can log things while my local client is away and keeps me in channels.
By Jesse Keating on Sep 16, 2009
I’m a big fan of these plugins:
* twirssi – twitter/identi.ca integration
* irssi-otr – encrypted communication
* adv_windowlist – crucial when you’re in many channels
* trackbar – draws a line each time you switch a way from a window, so you know where you left off.
* fnotify – pops up notification bubbles for remote irssi screen sessions
This is a decent tutorial too: http://quadpoint.org/articles/irssi
By Luke Macken on Sep 16, 2009