Irssi settings and Bash's Environment variables

Question

How can I define settings, such as ircname, nick and such things, in .bashrc for Irssi?

Answer 1

The settings for Irssi go in ~/.irssi/config.

However, in general, any Bash environment variable is set in ~/.bashrc like this:

export varname=value

The real question is how do you get Irssi to use those variables?

Answer 2

While I can imagine setting alias like:

alias irssi="irssi -c some.server -n your_nick"

it doesn't make sense. Irssi is very configurable, and it has a proper config file, so why don't you use it?

For example:

Start irssi, issue /network add; /server add; /channel add commands - best if you'd set the server and channel to auto-connect and autojoin.

Then, do /save, and quit irssi.

And then restart irssi, and voila - it will autoconnect everywhere you configured it to.

If you'll have any problems, just consult docs.

Answer 3

A much better way would be to set all these settings to your irssi config file. For example, this command will change the nickname:

/set nick Heoa

And every time you start irssi, this nickname will be used.

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If you still want it - irssi supports these environment variables:

• IRCNICK - nick
• IRCNAME - real_name (the ircname line in /whois output)
• IRCUSER - user_name (also called ident)
• IRCHOST - hostname (you will probably never use this one)

Note that these environment variables are only set on the first run, and they are ignored if ~/.irssi/config exists.