I’ve been using irssi a lot lately to mitigate the sheer volume of networks and channels I dick around in on IRC at any given moment, and using TheLounge is great and all, but I’m feeding node.js about 3GB just to keep it running. I’ve noticed that irssi barely breaches 130MB of RAM when left to idle. When you combine irssi with the really neat tricks like 100 windows in irssi, you can have an extremely RAM-efficient setup that’s capable of quick navigation and split-window juggling.

That said, I also want modern convenience, especially all of the formatting capabilities added to IRC itself.

So the first thing I did was set up a prefix keybinding.

/bind meta-x key metax

So I can start binding things like bold:

/bind metax-b insert_text \002

After that I set up italics:

/bind metax-n insert_text \029

Then I set up underline:

/bind metax-m insert_text \030

It took me a minute to realize how the prefix worked. It’s exactly as it appears. You press Meta-x then b, n, or m, depending on what formatting you’re using.

My final setup is now abduco -> dvtm -> irssi, and I have the script adv_windowlist.pl outputting my channel activity and list to a FIFO that dvtm is reading in a separate pane. It’s pretty pimp, ngl.