Re:Irssi – a modular text mode chat client
by opan on Wednesday June 12, 2024 @11:05AM
(#40658966)
Irssi remains my gold standard, not just for IRC, but chat clients in general. This does result in a lot of disappointment as no one's made anything near as good for XMPP or Matrix. You've just got superficially similar stuff like Profanity that falls apart under real use.
Irssi has incredible UX, features, extensibility with scripts (this is a big one, go2.pl is a killer feature for me). I also like that I can create aliases doing all sorts of things, like PMing a specific bot, giving me shorthand if I need to set a bunch of reminders or run wolfram alpha queries or YouTube searches. You can also run shell commands and send the output as a message, and these can be made into convenient aliases. Suddenly I can type /fig before some text to spit out the figlet output.
One thing that feels minor/obvious that most modern stuff is missing is having ordered numbered chats, and preserving that order but also letting you rearrange it. I remember the numbers for frequently used channels and can jump to them with about two key-strokes, e.g. esc-5. This lets you develop muscle memory and something like a spatial awareness of the chats. New stuff is like a hellish fever dream where if you close your eyes for a second, you're screwed. Everything is ordered by recency or activity and constantly jumping around. The room list only brings me stress in my Matrix clients. Meanwhile with irssi I can have my second monitor off because I was watching something immersive and pause for a second to quick send something to a certain IRC channel or person without looking and near 100% success rate. Jump to my named remote tmux terminal window with my Sway keybind, C-b 1 for the tmux window with irssi, my friend I talk to a lot is my 6th window so I hit esc-6, if it was already on that chat it gracefully does nothing (unlike weechat by default), I write my quick message, hit enter, jump back to mpv with another Sway keybind and continue watching. I simply don't trust gajim or nheko UX enough to do something similar with them. Irssi never lets me down.
Irssi has incredible UX, features, extensibility with scripts (this is a big one, go2.pl is a killer feature for me). I also like that I can create aliases doing all sorts of things, like PMing a specific bot, giving me shorthand if I need to set a bunch of reminders or run wolfram alpha queries or YouTube searches. You can also run shell commands and send the output as a message, and these can be made into convenient aliases. Suddenly I can type /fig before some text to spit out the figlet output.
One thing that feels minor/obvious that most modern stuff is missing is having ordered numbered chats, and preserving that order but also letting you rearrange it. I remember the numbers for frequently used channels and can jump to them with about two key-strokes, e.g. esc-5. This lets you develop muscle memory and something like a spatial awareness of the chats. New stuff is like a hellish fever dream where if you close your eyes for a second, you're screwed. Everything is ordered by recency or activity and constantly jumping around. The room list only brings me stress in my Matrix clients. Meanwhile with irssi I can have my second monitor off because I was watching something immersive and pause for a second to quick send something to a certain IRC channel or person without looking and near 100% success rate. Jump to my named remote tmux terminal window with my Sway keybind, C-b 1 for the tmux window with irssi, my friend I talk to a lot is my 6th window so I hit esc-6, if it was already on that chat it gracefully does nothing (unlike weechat by default), I write my quick message, hit enter, jump back to mpv with another Sway keybind and continue watching. I simply don't trust gajim or nheko UX enough to do something similar with them. Irssi never lets me down.