Articles tagged “irssi”

Irssi Setup

I’ve had a few questions recently about how I’ve got my irssi configured. Instead of typing it out every time, I’m posting it here.

For starters, I always have irssi running inside a screen session on my server. This obviously lets me stay online all the time and reconnect from any computer with an ssh client. Very convenient since people often leave me links while I’m away. My screen configuration can be found here.

Irssi Theme: fear2, modified by me. I call it fear3. I’ll post it up if anyone wants it.

Scripts:

screen_away.pl - I could not go without this one — especially because I use bitlbee for non-irc chat. screen_away allows me to go away automatically whenever I detach from my screen session. It does some other nifty stuff too, but this is all I’ve used it for.
nm.pl - Provides right aligned nicks and random nick colors.
adv_windowlist.pl - Another absolutely necessary one if you are going to use bitlbee. Provides a verbose window listing rather than the default window activity status.
bitlbee_*.pl - All the bitlbee scripts from irssi.org. They each provide a few things that make bitlbee a little more usable.

Without urgency hints, the irssi/bitlbee combo would be useless to me. Luckily I’ve taken care of this as outlined here.

I can say that this configuration is by far the most usable setup I’ve ever used for day to day chat. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to contact me.

Published on March 24, 2009 Comments

· · ·

Handling Urgency Hints

Recently I found myself getting tired of Pidgin‘s multi-window interface and began searching for alternatives. Because I’m already on IRC all the time anyway, I decided to take a shot at Bitlbee. Bitlbee takes all the useful features of Pidgin and sticks them in a familiar IRC-ish interface. The only annoying part was that the message notification Pidgin gave me was gone — no more color changing tags/taskbar. Enter urgency hints.

I’d played with them before when hacking on dwm. In fact, I added this feature to my dwm because of Pidgin in the first place. My challenge now was to get irssi to pass the hint to gnu-screen, to pass the hint to urxvt over an ssh session, to pass it to my window manager. This was suprisingly easy. Three configs are involved: ~/.irssi/config, ~/.screenrc, and ~/.Xdefaults. Additions are shown below.

~/.irssi/config

settings = {
    "fe-common/core" = {
        beep_msg_level = "NOTICE MSGS HILIGHT";
        bell_beeps = "no";
    };
};

~/.screenrc
```
vbell off
bell_msg '^G'
```
~/.Xdefaults
```
urxvt*urgentOnBell:    true
```

With these three settings, I now get a nice notification when receiving a message in Bitlbee or irssi. This has a nice side effect too. Many cli apps can send a bell when they need your attention. Mutt, for instance, can now notify you about new mail.

Published on November 17, 2008 Comments

rsontech.net

Articles tagged “irssi”

Irssi Setup

Handling Urgency Hints