Introduction
There are two components to this method. Screen, which is a program that allows you to run multiple command prompts, and detach from them, leaving them running on the server, even if you are not connected. The second component is IRSSI which is the IRC Client you’ll use to connect to the IRC server.
Start a screen session
At the command prompt simply type screen
This creates a new screen session, and puts you in it. You can end the session by type exit, which will close the current screen in the session, or if there is only one screen in that session, end the session.
If you want to detach the session without ending the session press
Useful commands starting out.
+a c – Create new screen in the session +a - Select the previous screen in the session a a – Select the previous screen shown
similar to pressingonce on Windows +a k – Kill current screen, Useful for hung programs
Reconnecting to an existing screen session
If you have an existing screen session already running, you can reconnect to it by running
- screen -r – This will reconnect to an existing screen session that is not currently in use.
- screen -rd – This will detach an existing session and reconnect it at your current terminal. This is useful if like me, you switch between two computers and tend to leave the other still connected to the server.
Sometimes you will have multiple screen sessions running. When using the above commands you can specify the PID to reconnect a specific screen session.
Irssi Basics
Irssi is a very nice IRC client, that allows quite a bit of customization. Irssi uses multiple windows to allow you bet connected to multiple servers
You should start Irssi inside a screen session, so do that before proceeding here.
Type /connect
to connect to a desired IRC server. In the same window this will start a connection to that server, showing you the connection communications. Once this is done, simply type /join
like you normally do. This will create and switch to a new window that represents that channel. From here you can start talking.
To switch between windows, press
Window 1, is the server window (unless you move it, or reconfigure it) and each window you open, will get added to the end.+
When looking at a window, you can use Page Up and Page Down to scroll back in the that window’s history.
That’s the basics, start chatting, and when you’re done, don’t forget to leave Irssi running and detach the screen.
Irssi has drastically more functionality then presented here, when you have more time read the documentaion.