Chat / IRC

IRSSI is a text-based IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client for Linux. It is used to connect to a server on an IRC network for chat.
A network is made up of several servers, all sync'd together to act like one big server, on which there are thousands of chat-rooms or "channels" which you can join to converse about whatever.

$ irssi

/server [servername for network you wish to join]

/nick [the handle or nickname you want to be known as on the network, has to be unique]

/join [channelname]

Example:

$ irssi
/server ign.ie.quakenet.org
/nick Yahoo_user1
/join #sin

Or you can specify these options as command-line variables:

$ irssi -c efnet.demon.co.uk -n fudgerygar

The above example will launch irssi, connect (-c) you to the irc server efnet.demon.co.uk which is part of the EF IRC network with the nick (-n) of 'fudgerygar'. Or you can modify the config files in ~/.irssi which are created after you first run irssi. These are pretty much self-explanatory.

More command-line arguments and help can be found with:

$ irssi --help

Or check out the IRSSI website documentation.

The above applies (with some slight changes) to just about every modern IRC client (eg. BitchX, mIRC, LIRC etc.)