ssh + screen + irssi [LWN.net]

ssh + screen + irssi

Posted Jan 16, 2007 20:31 UTC (Tue) by kmself (subscriber, #11565)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to graphical IRC clients by stuart
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to graphical IRC clients

Amen.

I tend to leave an active session up to Freenode's #debian and a few other channels. Hop on and off as time permits. And irssi simply rocks.

I've tried a number of the graphical clients (Gaim, Kopete, Chatzilla, XChat), and would consider most of them stopgaps until I could get irssi installed and running on a system. They do have the advantage of being multi-protocol clients, however, generally supporting IRC, Jabber, AIM, YIM, and other protocols / chat services, which can have its uses.

Incidentally, if you are stuck with Gaim, there's a UI-de-crufting tool, Gaim Extended Preferences which I strongly recommend. Mostly succeeds in losing a bunch of real-estate grabbing icons and toolbars and leaving you with a simple conversation box, text entry, and user list. Almost not even annoying.

(Log in to post comments)

ssh + screen + irssi

Posted Jan 16, 2007 20:53 UTC (Tue) by Zero_Dogg (subscriber, #31310) [Link]

I use bitlbee (http://bitlbee.org) which turns my ssh+screen+irssi session into an IM client aswell as an IRC client. Quite useful.

bitlebee

Posted Jan 16, 2007 23:54 UTC (Tue) by mbligh (subscriber, #7720) [Link]

Yup, that's an awesome app ... seems to do everything gaim can do.
Most glaring ommision is skype support.

bitlebee

Posted Jan 17, 2007 15:06 UTC (Wed) by mbanck (subscriber, #9035) [Link]

I think I read somewhere sometime ago that Skype had made their text-based chat protocol open (maybe in response to the announcement of Google Talk), but since then I haven't heard anything about it. Quite a couple of my non-FLOSS friends use Skype, so I'd be interested in integrated text-based Skype chat in bitlbee or somehow otherwise.

Anybody know about this?

Michael

bitlebee

Posted Jan 18, 2007 8:53 UTC (Thu) by bni (guest, #27103) [Link]

I can join in in the praising of bitlbee. The fact that they run public servers that you can use for free is also very nice. Makes it very easy to get going.

bitlebee

Posted Feb 11, 2008 12:46 UTC (Mon) by LintuxCx (subscriber, #14448) [Link]

Actually there's a very nice plugin that adds Skype support via the official Skype API. See
the bug report for more information: http://bugs.bitlbee.org/bitlbee/ticket/82