irc tricks

Internet Chat Relay, is a protocol for live interactive Internet text messaging (chat). It necessitate a client.

weechat

Personally I use weechat and here some notes about it:

Connect to an SSL server without checking certificat

There is a wonderful doc but I never remember how to connect on a server who as an non standard port and with ssl and with a non-valid certificate :

/connect my_server.expl/port -ssl -password=foo

and then on the server buffer :

/set irc.server.my_server.expl.ssl_verify off

Configuration

wee-chat is highly configurable.

For instance you can choose the maximum length of the nickname (the right one) in order to reduce the very long nickname:

/set weechat.look.prefix_align_max 12

One other cool thing: after an upgrade you can just type the /upgrade command in order to upgrade without restarting weechat.

You can found my whole config file for weechat on my github dotfiles

Bitlbee

BitlBee brings IM (instant messaging) to IRC clients. It's a great solution for people who have an IRC client running all the time and don't want to run an additional MSN/AIM/whatever client.

Install

In order to install BitlBee (from source, the package are outdated and for pussy) go on the download page and take the last tarball. wget should be great. Then untar it with tar -xvf and go on the directory. Now make a ./configure to see if you have all dependency (the main dependence is with libg, the debian package for that is libglib2.0-dev). The make. Now you should be able to run it with ./bitlbee (don't hesitate to make ./bitlbee -h and read ./doc/README to see more information) or more probably with ./bitlbee -F -p 6679. Then you just have to connect with your favorite irc client with /connect localhost/6667 (6667 is the default port for irc and so for BitlBee who is just an other irc server) or /connect localhost/6679.

Then you should go on the beautiful wiki of BitlBee to learn more about how to connect to Twitter, gtalk, facebook and whatever.