Getting Started with irssi

Monday, February 19, 2018 · 1 min read

How to get started with irssi, the terminal IRC client.

Install

Use Homebrew for the install. It is also helpful to run things in tmux so that you can maintain sessions.

$ brew install irssi
$ tmux -c irssi 

Starting with irssi

/set nick royce

Make sure to change your username and nicknames if you don’t want to use your system username as the default.

Joining Servers and Channels

Once irssi starts up, you can connect to IRC servers and then join channels.

/connect Freenode
/join #irssi

Config

The main config file is ~/.irssi/config.

Adding hilights to your username:

hilights = (
  { text = "royce"; color = "%M"; nick = "yes"; word = "yes"; }
);

Changing the names associated with your base accout logins.

settings = {
  core = { real_name = "royce"; user_name = "royce"; nick = "royce"; };
};

I had to remove networks from the default configuration to get things working with the SASL configuration.

/network remove Freenode
/network add -sasl_username <username> -sasl_password <password> -sasl_mechanism plain Freenode
/server add -auto -net Freenode -ssl -ssl_verify irc.freenode.net 6697
/channel add -auto #irssi Freenode