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Irssi 1.0.0 Released

290 points| raimue | 9 years ago |irssi.org | reply

130 comments

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[+] jdcarter|9 years ago|reply
Happy to see IRC still going strong. While I switched to irccloud.com a couple years ago--persistent session is so nice, especially for mobile!--I used CLI clients for years before.

Amusing blast from the past: back in the 90's I worked at General Magic, and wrote my own IRC client [1] for our handheld devices. I attached a Metricom wireless modem to the bottom of mine and could be on IRC from anywhere; it was like living in the future! /s

[1]: http://joshcarter.com/magic_cap/cujochat

[+] marsrover|9 years ago|reply
I'm also glad to see IRC still going strong. I much prefer IRC to StackExchange (not to diminish StackExchange, it's an amazing website) when looking for answers to questions. Not because I always get an answer, but when I do it's pretty quick and it's nice to have a direct conversation with the person who is helping.

In addition, there are a lot of nice little channels out there that are just fun to hang out in.

[+] kasbah|9 years ago|reply
>While I switched to irccloud.com a couple years ago--persistent session is so nice, especially for mobile!

https://riot.im with it's excellent IRC bridge is a solid alternative now (and fully open source).

[+] lacampbell|9 years ago|reply
IRC is great. I think I learned more about computing while "wasting time" on IRC game dev channels while I was a student than I ever did at actual university courses.
[+] unhammer|9 years ago|reply
You don't need irccloud to get persistence. There are many bouncers/proxies that let you connect from a device with flaky connections like a phone/laptop, as long as you have some always-connected machine where you can install things. Some popular ones are ZNC, Weechat, Quassel, Smuxi.

Quassel and Smuxi.im are GUI-based ones, where you can start them one one computer and connect from another. (I've never tried them, so can't say how they fare.)

I used ZNC for a while, that's a "pure bouncer" that just connects to your irc network and then you connect your client of choice to your ZNC. Simple and easy to set up, but not very featureful.

I recently switched to Weechat, which comes with a nice CLI interface, as well as letting you connect from regular IRC clients, or from special Weechat-clients (their own protocol which gives some more control I suppose). There's an HTML5 client https://www.glowing-bear.org/ that a lot of people like. I use the Android client https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android#weechat-androi... a lot, it's very nice, though from my laptop I connect from Emacs's built in client (M-x erc). I run Weechat on a Raspberry Pi 1 that I had lying around, just connected it to my router, ran "apt install weechat weechat-plugins tmux" and set "tmux new-session -d weechat -s chat" to run on startup, and added a relay: http://www.weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_user.en.html...

[+] ticoombs|9 years ago|reply
Why but just run a bouncer like znc?

I even have push notifications when I get tagged or a add a special keyword.

[+] tiglionabbit|9 years ago|reply
I wanted to use irccloud, but many IRC networks ban it in a blanket policy against "browser-based clients" because they can't get an IP address to ban if you misbehave.
[+] LeoPanthera|9 years ago|reply
Does it not bother you that irccloud can see everything you type/read on IRC?
[+] kobeya|9 years ago|reply
You can run irrsi in tmux.
[+] vesinisa|9 years ago|reply
Heh, great! And only 17 years in development!

First commit: https://github.com/irssi/irssi/commit/770ae45

[+] DoodleBuggy|9 years ago|reply
Right on schedule!

Time to finally switch from ircII?? /s

[+] gargarplex|9 years ago|reply
For those interested in consulting, IRC is a great way to find clients. You can both contribute your expertise and socialize and network with developers who specialize in technologies that you know well. I've found a great number of contractors through IRC (especially freenode). The fact that it requires a modicum of tech cred to navigate makes it a bit of a self-selecting pool, which is great.
[+] foo101|9 years ago|reply
For those of us who have not yet cracked the technique of finding clients via IRC, could you please share the name of a few channels where you could network and find clients?
[+] baldfat|9 years ago|reply
> Binary test packages for various Linux distributions are automatically generated by the openSUSE Build Service

The most underused Linux service to the rest of the community. So glad they are using this.

[+] cyphar|9 years ago|reply
For those who don't know, the Open Build Service is a project mainly maintained by the openSUSE community. Aside from building all of the packages for openSUSE and SUSE's enterprise distributions, it also can build Ubuntu, Debian, Arch Linux, Red Hat and Fedora packages. It also has a collaboration system which is the primary way that openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise are built.

[Disclaimer: I work for SUSE and am an openSUSE contributor.]

[+] josteink|9 years ago|reply
I've moved to weechat these days, but I'm glad to see the revived project making progress.

Irsii was my daily communications hero for many years.

[+] kqr|9 years ago|reply
I agree. I've been silently (and sometimes loudly...) groaning when I hear my friends start using Irssi back when it was still completely unmaintained. There's something nice about sometimes upgrading your software and actually getting surprised by new, useful features as well as security patches, which didn't happen with Irssi until very recently.
[+] itp|9 years ago|reply
I feel like I just discovered the Coelacanth isn't actually extinct. I initially assumed either:

1) I misread the name of something that merely looked like irssi, or 2) there was a new project names irssi that unfortunately used a name of a much older project.

There was a several year period of my life where the vast majority of my online communication took place inside irssi. And that time was not particularly recent!

Congrats to the team, awesome to see it still going.

[+] Florin_Andrei|9 years ago|reply
> I feel like I just discovered the Coelacanth isn't actually extinct.

Nah, that's when you hear BitchX has done a new release.

[+] xenophonf|9 years ago|reply
That's funny because recently I switched exclusively to irssi for personal IM stuff, as pretty much anyone I needed to IM outside of work were on IRC. It was kind of like coming home after traveling for a long time! Heck, I've even started using Gnus to read my email again. I don't know what's gotten into me. ;)
[+] m-p-3|9 years ago|reply
Interesting, I just learned that one of the developer (Kenny Root) also develops the ConnectBot Android app (SSH Client)!
[+] burchr|9 years ago|reply
Congrats to the team! Long time irssi user here, I've tried to move to several other clients over the years (for change's sake rather than any real reason), but nothing ever "stuck" with me.

Relatedly to this happy news, a gentle plug for a project I was involved in: https://github.com/rburchell/irssi-relay

irssi-relay allows you to connect weechat's relay clients to an irssi instance. I don't think it's gotten much use outside the few of us that work on it, more eyes are of course welcome.

[+] Foxboron|9 years ago|reply
Wow. I just have to say thank you. I love irssi, but the hassle of sshing from my phone has been an issue. This solved everything. the glowing bear phone app works great, but i couldnt get the weechat android app to work.

Thanks!

[+] yegle|9 years ago|reply
It's pity that Irssi only support Perl as its scripting language. In contrast, https://weechat.org/ support: Python/Perl/Ruby/lua/tcl/guile/Javascript.

UPDATE: I stand corrected.

[+] tomc1985|9 years ago|reply
Why? Perl's not that bad.

And you really want something that has to support all those language stacks? Ew.

[+] systems|9 years ago|reply
it is just a chat client why does it need to support all those languages

i understand that Perl5, isn't really exciting anymore

but .. i think it's ok

[+] akulbe|9 years ago|reply
Social networks come and go... but IRC lasts forever! :)

I've tried sooooo many different IRC clients. I always end up coming back to irssi.

[+] lacampbell|9 years ago|reply
Can anyone compare it to weechat? Never used irssi but weechat is my client of choice these days since my old client fell victim to the whole gtk2/gtk3 thing.
[+] 2ion|9 years ago|reply
Weechat lacks passive DCC. Otherwise, considering the respective plugin ecosystems, both can be made look and work pretty much alike.
[+] Aardwolf|9 years ago|reply
Funny, I was using that more than 10 years ago! My source of archlinux support when KDE didn't work.

Now we got phones with internet though, so it's no longer that hard to look up stuff when your computer is half down :)

[+] marsrover|9 years ago|reply
Wow, I would have guessed Irssi passed version 1.0.0 a long long time ago. I've been using it at least 10 years and it's a great and stable application.

I guess that goes to show how much I pay attention to versions.

[+] coldpie|9 years ago|reply
I'm glad to see another project dropping the meaningless major version number(s). If you don't have a criteria for incrementing the major number, just drop it. This seems to finally be catching on, hopefully we'll see the billion open source projects with meaningless "0." continue to fall off.
[+] josteink|9 years ago|reply
Are there any good irssi/weechat relay clients for iPhone or do I just have to live with that this phone sucks for geeky things like IRC?

I certainly can't seem to find anything in the istore...

Coming from android, that was such a surprise, and similarly, a massive downer.

[+] petre|9 years ago|reply
I used Irssi 15 years ago. Back then they announced a rewrite that was to become 1.0.