Using and configuring WeeChat, making IRC mostly painless

There’s a simplicity to IRC compared to most “modern” alternatives that is easy to love. This article is about how to set up the basics of the WeeChat IRC client.

First of all, a short tangent regarding the name: WeeChat (the IRC client) was released in 2003, predating the Chinese instant messaging app WeChat by about eight years. This, of course, does not matter much since the latter has more than 1.2B users (2022), which means confusion is unavoidable. It might be unnecessary to state it, but they have no connection to eachother.

Installing WeeChat#

It’s pretty likely that your *NIX package manager already offers WeeChat, so using pacman, dnf, apt or pkg should be sufficient. We’ll also be using tmux to keep the session alive, so for Debian:

apt install weechat tmux

First launch#

If you’ve never used tmux before, you only need to know that:

• tmux starts a new session
• CTRL+b followed by d will detach your session, keeping it alive in the background.
• tmux a will attach your tmux session again, assuming there is only one.

So let’s start by creating our first tmux session, then start WeeChat inside it:

tmux

weechat

When starting WeeChat the first time, you’ll be in the core buffer, which just means you haven’t configured any IRC servers yet to switch between. Let’s do that now.

Configuring IRC servers#

Let’s set up a connection to Libera.Chat, a network founded in 2021 by former staff at Freenode. It’s used by a wide variety of open source projects, and is a good place to start.

This part is also covered pretty well in the WeeChat Quickstart.

First, let’s add Libera as a server. As with any IRC network, it’s best to check with them directly what servers you can use, which Libera provides in their Connecting to Libera.Chat article:

I’m in the EU, and I like TLS, so I’ll do:

/server add libera irc.eu.libera.chat/6697

irc: server added: libera

Normally, you should be able to add -tls to this command, but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work, but that’s fine: this is an excellent reason to go through configuration of existing servers.

Reconfigure the ’libera’ server#

Run the following to get a verbose output of all attributes set for all servers, and use PGUP/PGDOWN to scroll:

/server listfull

Along lots of other attributes, you’ll see:

Server: libera [not connected]
  addresses. . . . . . : 'irc.eu.libera.chat/6697'
  (...)
  ssl. . . . . . . . . :   (off)

We know this should be a secure connection, so let’s change that value. These attributes are all available via irc.server.libera, where libera is the name you chose for the server, so the ssl value is set with:

/set irc.server.libera.ssl on

Option changed: irc.server.libera.ssl = on  (default if null: off)

This will be useful to know later when we want to set things like autoconnect, autojoin and so on.

Choosing a name#

Before connecting, we need to choose a name. Unlike what some may be used to, the nickname on IRC is set by the user themselves on every connection, and must be “reserved” by registration and authentication. WeeChat can handle this for us, but the risk of collision with yourself or someone that has rudely stolen your name means that setting up alternate names is common practice. Assuming your preferred name is deppenleerzeichen on this network, you may want to at least set:

/set irc.server.libera.nicks "deppenleerzeichen,deppenleerzeichen_"

Option changed: irc.server.libera.nicks = "deppenleerzeichen,deppenleerzeichen_"  (default if null: "root,root1,root2,root3,root4")

In this case, I’m running WeeChat in a container as root, which is why the default name is variants of “root” (the user running weechat).

Registering your name#

We’re now ready to connect, with our completely unregistered and made up name:

/connect libera

(...)
libera  -- | User mode [+Ziw] by deppenleerzeiche

The user mode +Z tells us that a secure connection was established successfully.

At this point, we could just join channels and start chatting away, but:

• We want our name to be registered, not only so we can know it won’t be used by other people, but also because some channels require it.
• It hides your “host”, meaning that if you run /whois your_name, your reverse DNS will be replaced by user/your_name, which is nice.
• We also want to set up authorization and channel joins automatically, so we don’t have to manually do this every time WeeChat starts back up (because you’ll forget how).

Nickname Registration in libera’s own documentation tells us how to do it:

/msg NickServ REGISTER some_decent_password [email protected]

An email containing nickname activation instructions has been sent to REDACTED.
Please check the address if you don't receive it. If it is incorrect, DROP then REGISTER again.
If you do not complete registration within one day, your nickname will expire.
deppenleerzeiche is now registered to REDACTED.

The e-mail you receive will contain a command you can run that looks like:

/msg NickServ VERIFY REGISTER deppenleerzeiche something

Just run that, and you’re done. Now that we have registered our name, we can set up authentication and channel joins to happen automatically.

SASL authentication#

Back in the bad old days, identification was done by doing something like /msg nickserv identify, which just sent a simple message to the “nickserv” user (a bot) which then proved your identity. These days, when supported, you should use SASL, so we’re doing that.

Simply set sasl_username and sasl_password to your nickname and chosen password respectively:

WARNING: If you are setting this up in a shared environment, this is not a secure way to store your password. Refer to Set custom IRC server options and use /secure passphrase and /secure set to set up a secure variable like ${sec.data.libera_password} instead.

The below is a bit simpler, but should only be used on single user systems.

/set irc.server.libera.sasl_username "mynick"
/set irc.server.libera.sasl_password "xxxxxxx"

If you /disconnect libera then /connect libera, somewhere in the output you should hopefully see:

You are now logged in as deppenleerzeiche (deppenleerzeiche!root@user/deppenleerzeiche)
deppenleerzeiche SASL authentication successful

Final touches#

Since we now have automatic authentication, the only thing left is to set up autoconnect rather than having to do /connect, and what channels we want to join. Autoconnect is just one of the attributes we saw earlier with /server listfull:

/set irc.server.libera.autoconnect on

You can verify that this works by doing /exit, which will kill WeeChat, then running weechat again.

The easiest way to set up auto-join of channels in my opinion is to simply join the channels you want, for example:

/join #libera

To switch between channels and the “status” window, just do ALT+UP/DOWN, or ALT+N where N is the number displayed on the left. When you’re in the status window, you can switch between server-specific buffers and the core buffer by pressing CTRL+x. You’ll notice that highlight colors change (to show what lines are relevant to your current buffer), and that irc/libera or core is displayed in the bottom left.

This is relevant because some commands only make sense in the context of a single server, like the one we’re going to run now:

/autojoin apply

libera     | Autojoin changed from empty value to "#libera"

This simply adds all the channels you are currently in to your autojoin list. If you run this in the “core” context, you’ll instead get:

weechat =!= | irc: command "autojoin" must be executed on irc buffer (server, channel or private)

You can now again run /exit, start WeeChat back up, and notice that both authentication and channel joins happen automatically.

Summary#

We have:

• Installed WeeChat
• Configured connecting to an IRC server over TLS
• Registered our name, and set up automatic authentication
• Set up auto-join for the channels we want

There’s obviously a lot more you can do with WeeChat, if you have any suggestions or feedback feel free to get back to me via Mastodon @[email protected] or e-mail.