Like many other Mozillians, I use irssi running in screen to connect to IRC. There are a bunch of advantages (access from anywhere, text-based interface, persistent connection to IRC, geek cred, etc.) as well as some disadvantages (text-based interface, persistent connection to IRC, geek cred, etc.). Before I switched, I thought the text-based interface would be a deal breaker, but I pretty quickly learned to adjust to that. I like it.
I put together a basic irssi-howto for people interested in learning to use irssi for IRC. It’s most useful to people who can use people.mozilla.org (Mozilla Corporation employees and contractors) and want to connect to irc.mozilla.org, but it could be relevant to anyone who wants to run irssi(+screen) on their own. The scripts are a mix of scripts I’ve written and scripts I’ve found. They do useful things like remembering channels, remembering channel passwords, and syncing screen and IRC away state.
Oh cool. I was wondering who else was using this setup. Nice work collecting this into one place.
Some random comments:
I’d recommend looking at and adding the advanced window list plugin to your scripts.
I usually start screen with `screen -dRU session_name` which is also good for reattaching it.
And last but not least: just one word–tmux 🙂
I keep my irssi config public at https://github.com/stasm/dotfiles/tree/master/irssi so if you find anything interesting there, feel free to use it!
Scripts I use that you didn’t mention:
invitejoin.pl – autojoin a channel when someone /invites you
nohilight.pl – you can unhilight some stuff. For example, I ignore bugbot saying my name so I don’t always get paged in #bmo
queryresume.pl – grabs the last $x lines of a log file you had with someone when you /query them again
Thanks for posting this Gavin. I’ve been looking for a better IRC setup (currently using X-Chat) where I can have a persistent connection and access it anywhere.
Your guide explains setting up irssi and screen, but I’m still not clear on the first piece with using people.mozilla.org for connecting. Can you provide more info on that?
William: probably best to ping me on IRC for more info, but the basic setup for people.mozilla.org access involves getting an SSH key attached to your LDAP account, and then setting SSH up to connect with your LDAP account’s POSIX username (usually just the part before @ in your LDAP account/email address) to people.mozilla.org.