Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a popular chat protocol that is widely used in FOSS development. But different timezones and the fact that not everyone is online 24/7 makes communication hard when you have a setup that forces you to quit and re-join the chat frequently (when shutting down your laptop, moving to another location etc.)

It doesn’t make sense to enter a room, ask a question, and leave 3 hours after, before anyone could answer because they are located on the other side of the world and are just waking up.

The solution is a permanent remote IRC session which allows you to have a backlog for times where you’re not actively behind your laptop.

Bouncer, remote shell or Matrix

There are different methods how you can achieve this.

• IRC-Bouncer is a software that runs on a remote server and acts like a proxy in between your local (desktop) client and the irc server.
• Matrix is a different, federated communication protocol which lets you allow to bridge other chat protocols (like IRC).
• A long-running shell on a remote server running weechat in relay mode, which can either act as IRC-Bouncer itself, or can serve weechat protocal compatible clients (Android, cross-platform GUI client and Web-based client).
• A long-running shell on a remote server which allows you to run a terminal-based IRC client, which you attach to when you’re online.

Even matrix is very promising, I have encountered severe communication issues when ppl used a matrix-irc bridge enabled server, i.e. messages I sent to them were never recieved, which fucks up communication pretty badly.

I’ll focus on the last option here, simply it works for me pretty well. If you prefer a GUI IRC dektop client, either the IRC-Bouncer or the weechat relay would be a better option for you.

Prerequisites

A shell on a remote server, with following tools installed:

• A so-called “terminal multiplexer” which lets you re-attach a running shell session, like tmux or GNU screen
• A chat client with a text user interface, like weechat or irssi (see also Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients)

I’ll explain the weechat and tmux combination here, but this is mainly personal preference.

Getting around in tmux

Before i reinvent the wheel, here’s a good tutorial for tmux.

Of course there are dozens of other howtos out there.

We won’t need the complexity of multiple windows and other functionallity that tmux brings - for this setup, we only use the ability to attach and detach to a running session.

The very first time we need to initiallaly start a tmux session

# tmux

Now you can do stuff in newly started shell. Use Ctrl-b d to detach the session.

You can re-attach the shell with:

# tmux attach

Now continue doing stuff on running shell, and use Ctrl-b d again to detach the session.

If you’re familiar with tmux, you can move on to the next topic.

Weechat

Irssi was the first text based chat client, released in 1999. Weechat followed a few years after. Both offer mainly similar functionallity. Don’t confuse weechat with wechat !

I prefer weechat, mainly because it is in active development (where irssi recieving only bugfixes) and comes with a nice nicklist bar that displayes well in mobile devices as well.

Here’s the oficial weechat quick start guide.

Start weechat with

# weechat

In this example we’ll join the #leap chat is on the [freenode IRC network](How can I connect to freenode server using SSL?).

freenode IRC network is pre-configuerd in weechat, but we still need to configure SSL for it, please follow How can I connect to freenode server using SSL? to set it up.

Then save the settings

/save

Connect to it with

/connect freenode

and join #leap with

/join #leap

And tomorrow ?

The main daily task from now will be to login to the server, attach and attach to the tmux session. You don’t need to properly detach from it, just shutting down your laptop will do this as well.

# tmux attach

The running weechat session wil show up, remember to use Ctrl-b d to detach the session.

Then exit from your login shell:

# exit

Have fun !