I recently switched from Colloquy to Irssi. It seems like a step back, after all Irssi is a text based command line client, but it’s very useful. There are some good tutorials linked to from the irssi documentation site, especially to get a hang of window management and using it with screen, another nice utility I started using lately. With both screen and irssi, I can now be on IRC without having a window open and switch back to it whenever I can or want. I can also watch as many chats as I want at the same time.

I installed irssi on my Mac using Macports with the +perl variant, but had tons of trouble getting the Growl perl bindings compiled because some libraries were missing in the Macports perl. Since I know nothing about perl, I decided to just compile irssi with the built-in perl and break the Macports rule of having everything contained in the /opt/local directory.

To do that, just do

sudo port edit irssi

Update the perl lib directory around line 46 to:

--with-perl-lib=/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/

And finally

sudo port install irssi +perl

That should do the trick, albeit the warning Macports spits out. Now, just make sure that your /usr/bin path has priority over /opt/local/bin, at least for now, and follow the instructions over at this blog. After that, enjoy Growl notifications from irssi.

If anyone can figure out an easier way, maybe to use all the libs that OS X comes with in the Macports perl, by including them in perls @INC, let me know, since I can’t figure it out

Finally, if you would like to hang out in IRC and keep up with Web-Empowered Church stuff, join us in ##wec on Freenode!

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