I have been using irssi as my Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for more than a decade. It has served me well. But then I was prompted by a couple of weechat users over at the #ranger channel to try weechat.

I love technical improvements, but my setup is becoming increasingly hard to improve upon. Any suggestions that tickle my nerdy fancy is highly welcome. And so I embarked upon setting up weechat on one of my DigitalOcean servers and use ssh to connect to my new chat client. This setup allows me to always remain on the chat channels even when my laptop is hibernated. I simply reconnect via ssh to weechat running in screen on my server. An added benefit is that I can also stay on with my Android phone via the excellent “Weechat Android” app. How cool is that?

The configuration is nicely interactive and with a set of useful scripts, I have a powerful setup:

• iset.pl – Set WeeChat and plugins options interactively (a must-have)
• buffers.pl – Sidebar with list of buffers (another must-have)
• shortenurl.py – Shorten long urls using isgd or tinyurl (important)
• nickregain.pl – Automatically attempts to regain IRC primary nick
• colorize_nicks.py – Weechat nick colors in the chat area and command line
• go.py – Quick jump to buffers
• buffer_autoclose.py – Automatically close inactive private message buffers
• histsearch.py – Quick search in command history
• auto_away.py – A simple auto-away script

And then I got Bitlbee set up on the server. Bitlbee is a chat hub for various protocols that weechat can connect to. Bitlbee can hook onto your Facebook chat and your Twitter feed. I got both Facebook chat and Twitter up and running and now I can tweet directly in weechat and have chats and even group chats with Facebook friends in my weechat – both on my laptop and on my mobile. Weechat has become a nice communications hub:

My weechat screen