Back to Irssi

For several years, I used Irssi in tmux on a shell server. A few months ago, I started using Circe as my IRC client (connected to a ZNC bouncer) after a brief stint with ERC. Circe had various issues:

  • Basic features, such as the display of my current nick, current channel modes, and /LIST, were not implemented.
  • The tab completion omitted the colon after the nick, even with circe-completion-suffix set to the default : . It also occasionally gave odd tab completion suggestions based on obscure substrings.
  • The currently focused channel(s) still appeared in the tracker regardless of lui-track-behavior’s value.
  • Even with circe-lagmon-mode, Circe did not reconnect to my bouncer after losing the network connection.
  • circe-lagmon-mode did not work with some servers.
  • circe-lagmon-mode would cause Circe to spam “*** User away: <current nick>” when I was set as away, at least with multiple instances of Circe running.
  • Circe would set my away message to my nick instead of what I typed as an argument to /[G]AWAY.
  • The topic was not always visible à la Irssi, WeeChat, or ERC’s top bar. I would rather not type /TOPIC constantly.
  • WHOIS output would appear in random buffers.

Early this month, I switched back to Irssi (with ZNC this time) after getting tired of Circe’s bugs. With multiple clients at least, it is not as good as bare Irssi in a terminal multiplexer, but it works better than Circe did.