I, like most communication minded people, use irssi in a screen session on a shell box. I connect to roughly 5-6 servers, mixed between IRC, IRC+SSL, and SILC systems. The documentation on configuration of the irssi config file is pretty non-existant, so after struggling for far too long, I've decided to share my notes for anyone else that may find them useful.

Step 1: Add your servers and networks to the servers = section of the document.

Example:

{ address = "silc.XXXXXXXXX.com"; chatnet = "XXXXXXXXX"; port = "706"; autocon nect = "yes"; },
{ address = "irc.YYYYY.org"; chatnet = "YYYYY"; port = "6667"; autoconnect = "yes"; use_ssl = "yes"; },

The item to note with this section is the use of the parameter use_ssl. It's not documented very well and I pretty much had to guess or get lucky with a google search to find it.

Step 2: Add your channels to the channels = section of the config file.

Example:

{ name = "BlahBlah-Channel"; chatnet = "XXXXXXX"; autojoin = "Yes"; }, { name = "Foo-Chanel"; chatnet = "YYYYYYY"; autojoin = "Yes"; password = "NOWAY"; },

The interesting thing to note with this section is the use of the password parameter. This is used for channels that require passwords to connect. Again this isn't documented well anywhere.

Step 3: Autorun SILC Plugin

This is the one that took me the longest to figure out. To autorun a plugin in irssi you have to create a file in your .irssi directory called startup. It's not there by default and not documented anywhere. In this file put "LOAD silc" to autoload the silc plugin upon starting irssi. Becareful though, it took me a while to figure out that "LOAD silc" is NOT the same as "LOAD SILC". Loading the plugin is case sensitive.

And finally a bit of humour to ensure that this post actually gets hits *GRIN*. Thanks to Cooler for sending me this one...