Irssi is an IRC client. If that sentence made no sense, then read no further. This post outlines my current irssi setup as I think it's quite nice and others may wish to copy it.
Screenshot
Config
For the longest time I didn't really touch ~/.irssi/config except to set up auto connections etc. Then I started using awl.pl (which I'll describe in the scripts section). This meant I no longer had a use for one of the statusbars. So for the sake of completeness, here is the change I made to get the statusbar look you see in the screenshot:
My full config (sans passwords) can be downloaded here.
Theme
The theme I currently use was originally generane.theme; I've gradually hacked away at it until, at this point, it's entirely unlike that theme. I just call it my.theme and it can be downloaded here. It's basically a really grey theme to go with my overall desktop. Messages from me are a bright-ish grey, with messages to me as bright yellow. Actions (/me stuff) are magenta and offset to the left which I really like.
Bitlbee
Bitlbee is a killer app. It basically sets up a small-footprint IRC server on your local machine, hooks into your various chat protocols (gchat, aim, facebook, twitter), and let's you /join or /query them as if they were any other #channel.
This is great for someone like me who's gotten used to /exec -o foo and other tricks that aren't possible in a normal chat client.
There are a lot of guides online for setting this up so I'm just going to list out a few facts that it took me a minute to figure out or get used to:
In the &bitlbee channel, any text not prefixed with a buddy's nick is interpreted as a command to bitlebee itself.
If you decide to chat with buddies by sending nick-prefixed messages within the main &bitlbee channel, it's not a chatroom and they can't see things you send to other nicks.
Whether you decide to talk to a buddy via a nick-prefixed message or a query, bitlbee remembers this and any future conversations initiated by them will come in the same way by default.
Scripts
And the best part, the scripts. All of these can be easily googled for so I won't provide links; the versions on my box could even be out of date anyway.
cap_sasl.pl - in an effort to streamline my dotfiles management, I was looking for ways to get plaintext passwords out of dotfiles. One such way is to use SASL for authentication to freenode. After getting the script, setup can be done via in-irssi commands as many existing how-tos outline. I got gummed up however because I fudged up the server name (freenode vs Freenode) when setting up sasl compared to when I had initially setup the connection...
This is why I prefer to do direct, in-file configuration. So, here are the portions of .irssi/config to support this:
And place a file as ~/.irssi/sasl.auth with the following contents:
It's important that you use your primary nick or it won't work. For instance, I always talk as brisbin but that's just a secondary nick associated with my primary brisbin33, so I had to use brisbin33 in the sasl setup.
nm.pl - this handles random/unique nick coloring and nick alignment. Personally, I /set neat_maxlength 13.
awl.pl - the advanced window list (sometimes called adv_windowlist.pl). This gives that nice statusbar with the channel names and numbers. Channels turn bright white when active and magenta if I'm highlighted. Personally, I use /set awl_display_key "%w$N.$H$C$S" and awl_maxlines 1.
trackbar.pl - this puts a dashed mark in the buffer at the last point you viewed the conversation. I really like this script, it's simple but affective. If you hop around between windows this is a great little addition to your .irssi/scripts/autorun.
screen_away.pl - thank you rson for turning me onto this. Once I started using irssi exclusively in screen (as outlined here) this script really started coming in handy. It just auto-sets you as away when you detach your screen session and brings you back when you reattach. This means Ctrl-a d logs me off, and when I do reattach I've got all my messages waiting for me right there in window 1.
queryresume.pl - now that I'm using bitlbee as my main IM client, I'm spending a lot of time in queries. This script gives you a little bit of context by printing the last few lines of your most recent query with this person that you've just started a new query with.
hilightwin.pl - this script captures any text that matches your /hilight rules, whether it's nick or keyword-based. Anything you've set up as a hilight will be captured in a dedicated window. Couple this with a smart layout where your hilightwin is dedicated to the top 8 lines of your client, and you can always see who's talking at you, no matter what you're doing. Any google search for this script will not only give you the source, but also the commands required to setup the smart layout to go along with it.
link_titles.pl - this is a script that I recently wrote as a learning exercise in perl. It basically watches the conversation for urls. When it finds one, it visits that page and prints the title element back to the window where the link was sent. Most actual channels I'm in will have a bot that does this, but I wanted to print titles for links sent to me in a query via gchat or aim. The source for this is on my github, hopefully more scripts will show up there soon.
If you have any ideas for a script that's not already available, please let me know in the comments. I'm looking for something perl-ish to work on.