Irssi ( ) is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client program for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Microsoft Windows. It was originally written by Timo Sirainen, and released under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later in January 1999.

According to the developers, Irssi was written from scratch, not based on ircII (like BitchX and epic). Numerous Perl scripts have been made available for Irssi to customise how it looks and operates. Plugins are available which add encryption and protocols such as ICQ and XMPP.

Irssi may be configured by using its user interface or by manually editing its configuration files, which use a syntax resembling Perl data structures. NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Ubuntu, and others.

Irssi builds and runs on Microsoft Windows under Cygwin, and in 2006, an official Windows standalone build was released.

For the Unix-based macOS, text mode ports are available from the Homebrew, MacPorts, and Fink package managers, and two graphical clients have been written based on Irssi, IrssiX, and MacIrssi. The Cocoa client Colloquy was previously based on Irssi, but it now uses its own IRC core implementation.

See also

  • Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients
  • Shell account
  • WeeChat

References

  • irssi on GitHub
  • on Libera Chat