However, one feature that neither client offered is, of course, staying connected to the IRC server when the computer is asleep. It is quite useful for me to be able to log into the IRC channels that my colleagues are on and be able to scroll back a ways to see what the current conversation is about, or to see if I missed anything that is important to me. The obvious solution here is to use an IRC client running on a remote machine that is always running. Most people I’ve talked to use the Irssi running in a screen session on a shell server somewhere. This is a perfect solution to the stated problem.

Using this method to connect to the IRC does bring up one whole new problem. Since I am in anywhere from 7 to 10 different IRC channels at a time and have work to do that doesn’t involve watching all channels all the time, I’ve relied on Growl notifications to alert me whenever someone mentions my nick. This is one feature that most people have to give up on in order to stay connected using Irssi in a Screen session. Well, I did some research and found a couple of pages on the internet that provided very useful information to make possible using Irssi in a screen session on a remote server and still get Growl notifications anytime your nick is mentioned! Here is how to do it:

First of all, I won’t go into setting up Irssi or Screen. There is more than enough documentation on the web to help with doing that. Also, I don’t want to take credit for figuring out how to do this. Most of the information came from this page.

First step:
Download this script, unzip it and place it in your ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/ folder (create this directory if it doesn’t exist yet).

Second step:
Make sure your SSH public key is on the remote server where you will be running your irssi instance.

Third step:
Create a script on your local computer. I named it “growl_irc.sh” and placed it in my ~/bin/ directory, which I have added to my PATH variable.

#!/bin/bash

# Kill all current fnotify sessions
ps | awk '{if($0 ~ /fnotify/ && $1 ~ /[0-9]+/ && $4 !~ /awk/) print $1}' |
while read id; do
kill $id
done

# SSH to host, clear file and listen for notifications
(ssh username@hostname -o PermitLocalCommand=no \
"> .irssi/fnotify; tail -f .irssi/fnotify" |
while read heading message; do
growlnotify -t "${heading}" -m "${message}";
done)&

Fourth Step:
Download and install growlnotify. It is in the DMG in a directory called Extras that you can download from http://growl.info/

Fifth Step:
Write a simple script, which opens an SSH session to the remote host and also starts the growl_irc.sh script. I call it “irc” and put it in my ~/bin/ directory:

#!/bin/bash
~/bin/growl_irc.sh
ssh user@hostname

Sixth Step:
On the remote server, I wrote another little wrapper script to resume the screen session. It just has one line:

screen -raAd

This can also be called “irc” or this line could be added to the .bash_profile file, if that is all the remote server will be used for.

So now my workflow is as follows: Open a terminal, type irc, once logged into the remote server, type irc again and I have my Irssi up and running with working growl notifications. Enjoy!

Extra tips:
Since I don’t want my irssi window to get lost among all the other terminal windows I have open, I use Terminal.app for regular terminal work and iTerm for Irssi. This way I can have default window sizes and colors for Irssi be different than for other terminal stuff.

You can configure the growlnotify Application in the Growl Preference Pane to make changes to how long the notification stays on screen, etc.

If you read the manpage for growlnotify, you can find ways to tweak the notification’s icon, etc.

Look at the scripts available on http://www.irssi.org/scripts to find how to change the appearance of Irssi, i.e. to get colored nicks and a list of active nicks in a channel on the sidebar, reminiscent of X-Chat or other GUI clients.