irssi (in screen) tips and tricks and scripts
Like many other Mozillians, I use irssi running in screen to connect to IRC. There are a bunch of advantages (access from anywhere, text-based interface, persistent connection to IRC, geek cred, etc.) as well as some disadvantages (text-based interface, persistent connection to IRC, geek cred, etc.). Before I switched, I thought the text-based interface would be a deal breaker, but I pretty quickly learned to adjust to that. I like it.
I put together a basic irssi-howto for people interested in learning to use irssi for IRC. It’s most useful to people who can use people.mozilla.org (Mozilla Corporation employees and contractors) and want to connect to irc.mozilla.org, but it could be relevant to anyone who wants to run irssi(+screen) on their own. The scripts are a mix of scripts I’ve written and scripts I’ve found. They do useful things like remembering channels, remembering channel passwords, and syncing screen and IRC away state.