3 irssi, http://irssi.org
13 - docs/ directory contains several documents:
14 - startup-HOWTO.txt - new users should read this
15 - manual.txt - manual I started writing but didn't get it very far :)
16 - perl.txt - Perl scripting help
17 - formats.txt - How to use colors, etc. with irssi
18 - faq.txt - Frequently Asked Questions
19 - special_vars.txt - some predefined $variables you can use with irssi
24 Irssi is a modular IRC client that currently has only text mode user
25 interface, but 80-90% of the code isn't text mode specific, so other
26 UIs could be created pretty easily. Also, Irssi isn't really even IRC
27 specific anymore, there's already a working SILC (http://www.silcnet.org)
28 module available. Support for other protocols like ICQ could be created
34 So what's so great about Irssi? Here's a list of some features I can
37 - Optional automation - There's lots of things Irssi does for you
38 automatically that some people like and others just hate. Things like:
39 nick completion, creating new window for newly joined channel, creating
40 queries when msgs/notices are received or when you send a msg, closing
41 queries when it's been idle for some time, etc.
43 - Multiserver friendy - I think Irssi has clearly the best support
44 for handling multiple server connections. You can have as many as you
45 want in as many ircnets as you want. Having several connections in one
46 server works too, for example when you hit the (ircnet's) 10
47 channels/connection limit you can just create another connection and
48 you hardly notice it. If connection to server is lost, Irssi tries to
49 connect back until it's successful. Also channels you were joined
50 before disconnection are restored, even if they're "temporarily
51 unavailable" because of netsplits, Irssi keeps rejoining back to them.
52 Also worth noticing - there's not that stupid "server is bound to this
53 window, if this window gets closed the connection closes" thing that
54 ircII based clients have.
56 - Channel automation - You can specify what channels to join to
57 immediately after connected to some server or IRC network. After joined
58 to channel, Irssi can automatically request ops for you (or do
59 anything, actually) from channel's bots.
61 - Window content saving - Say /LAYOUT SAVE when you've put all the
62 channels and queries to their correct place, and after restarting
63 Irssi, the channels will be joined back into windows where they were
66 - Tab completing anything - You can complete lots of things with tab:
67 nicks, commands, command -options, file names, settings, text format
68 names, channels and server names. There's also an excellent /msg
69 completion that works transparently with multiple IRC networks.
70 Completing channel nicks is also pretty intelligent, it first goes
71 through the people who have talked to you recently, then the people who
72 have talked to anyone recently and only then it fallbacks to rest of
73 the nicks. You can also complete a set of words you've specified, for
74 example homepage<tab> changes it to your actual home page URL.
76 - Excellent logging - You can log any way you want and as easily or
77 hard as you want. With autologging Irssi logs everything to specified
78 directory, one file per channel/nick. ircII style /WINDOW LOG ON is
79 also supported. There's also the "hard way" of logging - /LOG command
80 which lets you specify exactly what you wish to log and where. Log
81 rotating is supported with all the different logging methods, you can
82 specify how often you want it to rotate and what kind of time stamp to
85 - Excellent ignoring - You can most probably ignore anything any way
86 you want. Nick masks, words, regular expressions. You can add
87 exceptions to ignores. You can ignore other people's replies in
88 channels to nicks you have ignored. You can also specify that the
89 specific ignores work only in specific channel(s).
91 - Lastlog and scrollback handling - /LASTLOG command has some new
92 features: -new option checks only lines that came since you last did
93 /LASTLOG command, -away option checks new lines since you last went
94 away. Regular expression matches work also, of course. Going to some
95 wanted place at scrollback has always been hard with non-GUI clients. A
96 search command that jumps around in scrollback in GUI-style is still
97 missing from Irssi, but there's something that's almost as good as it.
98 /LASTLOG always shows timestamps when the line was printed, even if you
99 didn't have timestamps on. Now doing /SB GOTO <timestamp> jumps
100 directly to the position in scrollback you wanted. Great feature when
101 you want to browse a bit of the discussion what happened when someone
102 said your name (as seen in awaylog) or topic was changed (/last
108 See TODO file if it is already listed in there - if not send me email..
115 - cras at ircnet/opn/silc
116 - #irssi at ircnet/opn, #irssi.fi, #irssi.de and #irssi.pl at ircnet