* 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

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.

- 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.

_hth (not in vim at the moment),

James.

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.

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!