Using the IRC client irssi

Ever since I got my Raspberry Pi I’ve been using irssi for my IRC needs. Pidgin used to be my favorite client of choice for IRC and almost any other protocol. What makes irssi great is that I can keep it running on my Raspberry Pi and can resume my chat sessions wherever I am on whatever device (phone, iPad, iPod Touch, Laptop, Desktop) thanks to SSH and tmux.

These are some of the common shortcut keys I use a lot:

  • alt + p for page up
  • alt + n for page down
  • alt + left/right for switching tabs
  • alt + 0..9 for switching tabs

Aside from alt + p and alt + n you can also use PageUp and PageDown, but when I use my iPad via iSSH and my Bluetooth keyboard those keys aren’t available, and command + up / command + down don’t seem to work in iSSH.

And some other commands:

  • /who to list the users in the current channel
  • /join for joining a channel
  • /server for connecting to a server, this will replace your current connection though
  • /connect like the above, but keeps other connections intact
  • /help to show most commands, if not all

You can do a lot more with irssi than this. For example, you can write your own plugins. I haven’t had the need for this and I only use IRC for basic chatting really. If there’s a cool feature I’m missing out on I’d be glad to learn about it, so leave a comment if it’s worth mentioning.

Scroll to Top