Q: Why doesn't irssi display colors even when ircii etc. displays them? A: Irssi uses curses, ircii and others don't (no, not even if ldd says they use it). Curses decides if terminal supports colors based on the TERM variable, so changing it should help. Some values to try when running in xterm are: xterm, xterm-color and color_xterm. Q: Why does irssi crash when pressing Ctrl-4? A: Most unices are usually configured to send SIGQUIT to active process when Ctrl-\ is pressed. Some terminals also treat Ctrl-4 and Ctrl-\ equally, so Irssi will die to SIGQUIT. Two ways to fix this: change it to something else with stty (stty quit undef) or in irssi /SET ignore_signals quit Q: Where's the GUI version? A: Read http://irssi.org/?page=about Q: How do I easily write text to channel that starts with '/' character? A: / /text Q: I connected to some server which isn't responding but now irssi tries to connect back to it all the time! How can I stop it? A: Two ways. The "good way" to do it is with /DISCONNECT. Check the server tags first with /SERVER without giving it any parameters, reconnections are those that have tag starting with "recon" text. So most probably you're going to do /DISCONNECT recon-1. The other way is to remove all the reconnections with /RMRECONNS, easier but may remove some connections you actually wanted to reconnect (if you used multiple servers..). Q: Why does irssi say "Irssi: Channel not fully synchronized yet, try again after a while" when I try to use /BAN etc? A: IRC server you use is coded badly, do something like this: /IRCNET ADD -querychans 1 quakenet /SERVER ADD -ircnet quakenet irc.quakenet.org /SAVE After that /CONNECT quakenet should work properly (NOTE: when you do this the first time you'll have to /DISCONNECT and /CONNECT again, /SERVER doesn't work correctly).