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