How to stay logged in on IRC forever?

You may have different reasons why you want to stay (always) connected to an IRC channel. Maybe you did a question and you are waiting for a response but you have other things to do and you want to shut your notebook down. Or maybe you are the maintainer of a program and you would like to see all the questions your users did during the last 24 hours.

Firstly, you will need a cloud service with Linux. Then you will have to install and set up 'weechat' and 'tmux'.

Installing Weechat
Weechat is a text-based IRC client easy-to-use.

$ sudo apt-get install weechat

Installing tmux
tmux is a terminal multiplexer that allows you to have multiple terminal sessions to be accessed from a single screen. You can switch between these terminals.

$ sudo apt-get install weechat

After installing tmux and weechat, start a new tmux session. We will call to this session ircsession.

$ tmux new -s ircsession

Then you will open weechat.

$ weechat

In weechat, you can connect to the IRC server and channel you want. For example, let's connect to #gstreamer in irc.freenode.net!

/set irc.server.freenode.nicks "your_nickname"
/connect freenode
/join #gstreamer

If you got an error about SASL, do this:

/set irc.server.freenode.sasl_username "your_nickname"
/set irc.server.freenode.sasl_password "xxxxxxx"

That's it. You can close the terminal window when you want. if you want to see your IRC tmux session again later, type:

tmux attach -t ircsession

TIPS

• "pg up" to scroll up.
• "pg dn" to scroll down.
• "F11" to scroll nicklist up.
• "F12" to scroll nicklist down.

For more information, you can check the Weechat quick start guide.