Lately I’ve been on this kick of going back to the days before social media. Partly because of my break from live streaming, discord and Instagram, and partly because I still like the old school way of doing things sometimes – the early 2000’s were my peak IRC chat/linux days, so it left me feeling nostalgic.
I remember using one of my fave terminal clients called Irssi. It’s basically an IRC chat client that you can run in any terminal on any OS. It’s wonderful. And simple. And once installed, always available and lightweight.
Here are instructions to save your Irssi preferences. Download the client for your current OS then do the following:
To add your IRC server of choice (this example uses Freenode) to the Irssi config and run automatically:
/server add -auto -network Freenode irc.freenode.net 6667
To add your nick to Freenode and automatically use that nick whenever connecting to the network:
/network add -nick <your-nick> Freenode
This will make you join your channel of choice on Freenode every time Irssi is opened:
/channel add -auto #channel Freenode
Assuming you have your nick registered, you can do this to identify automatically:
/network add -autosendcmd "/msg nickserv identify <your-password> ;wait 2000" Freenode
Now enjoy chatting to your fave communities that are still kicking it old school. You can also find a bunch of nifty themes online. If you happen to be on Freenode, find me at BinaryDigits 
Top comments (4)
I am so happy this post exists... the nostalgia of joining IRC channels is real!
Back in the days where the only development I could do was Visual Basic and I couldn’t get past the definition of “tokens” even though I so badly wanted to write my own IRC bots and commands 😂
YES exactly! College days for me :D
I still maintain the LiCe IRC script. It's for the ircII (now epic) console IRC client. lice dot muppetz dot com
It's over 20 years old now 😀
excellent!!