Irssi is a terminal based IRC client with more than a mouthful of useful scripts and plugins available.
To download and install Irssi, open up a terminal and run this command:
$ sudo apt-get install irssi
Running it is as simple as opening a terminal and typing:
$ irssi
If you haven't started irssi, go ahead and do that. Once connected, you should set your nick and real name like so:
/set nick <nick> /set real_name <Real_Name>
Once done, go ahead and join #crunchbang.
/connect irc.freenode.net /join #crunchbang
It's always a good idea to register your nick, to do so type:
/msg nickserv register <password> <email>
Freenode will send you an email asking you to verify your account. Not every channel does this, and the ones that do will let you know upon registration.
If you're going to be using IRC a lot, you're not going to want to type /connect and /join everytime. Thankfully, you can set Irssi to autojoin multiple networks and channels on startup. To set it up with Freenode and #crunchbang, type the following:
/network add -nick <nick> Freenode /server add -auto -network Freenode irc.freenode.net /channel add -auto #crunchbang Freenode
Now, if you registered your nick earlier, you can set it to autologin as well.
/network add -autosendcmd "/msg nickserv identify <password>;wait 2000" Freenode
And now you're all set up to join #crunchbang every time you start Irssi!
To save your current configurations, type:
/save
You can also see a list of your saved networks by typing:
/network
By default, Irssi includes a few commons servers. I always get rid of these, and you can too by typing:
/network remove <server>
Irssi has an easy-to-use way of running scripts. Scripts you only want to run when you want them to should go in ~/.irssi/scripts, scripts you want loaded on startup should go in ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun.
In this example, we'll be loading the advanced window list plugin.
First things first, you need to create the scripts directories:
$ mkdir ~/.irssi/scripts $mkdir ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun
Now, head on over to ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun and download the adv_window list script.
$ cd ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun $ wget http://anti.teamidiot.de/static/nei/*/Code/Irssi/adv_windowlist.pl
Once it's done, you can go ahead and load it by going back into Irssi and typing:
/script load autorun/adv_windowlist.pl
Theres a million and one things you can do with Irssi, some beyond IRC. A few things I use and recommend checking out:
http://moc.daper.net/node/272- Control MoC from Irssi.
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/550/installing-using-twirssi-irssi-twitter-client/ - Twirssi (Twitter & Irssi).
http://scripts.irssi.org/scripts/nickcolor.pl - Use your terminal's color palette to assign different users a different nick color.
Irssi has a pretty big list of plugins on their site at http://scripts.irssi.org/