Maintaining a constant IRC presence

The fol­low­ing is an e‑mail that I post­ed to the SLUG mail­ing list:

Sub­ject: [SLUG] Main­tain­ing a con­stant IRC pres­ence
Date: Sun­day 03 Sep­tem­ber 2006 13:07
From: Srid­har Dhana­palan
To: SLUG list

I am in a sit­u­a­tion that I’m sure a lot of SLUG mem­bers are in. I am a
pro­lif­ic user of IRC, using it from one of three machines depend­ing on where
I am. I have three main prob­lems:

  (1) main­tain­ing a sin­gle and con­stant online pres­ence
  (2) main­tain­ing eas­i­ly acces­si­ble chat logs, even when not at the machine
  (3) being noti­fied of mes­sages that suit spe­cif­ic cri­te­ria

I cur­rent­ly use Xchat, which means that I am logged in at least two places at
once. Being a fat client, it can beep when I have a mes­sage. If I leave it
con­nect­ed, it keeps logs (I only need the last 1000 lines or so). I can’t do
this with my lap­top, though (I need to dis­con­nect when trav­el­ling). Also, it
forces me to have a sep­a­rate login for each machine (and hence each Xchat
ses­sion) con­nect­ed.

Issues (1) and (3) can be addressed by some­thing like irssi-proxy[1], since it
would allow me to use local clients with a sin­gle login. I could ssh into a
sin­gle sys­tem run­ning irssi, which would alle­vi­ate both (1) and (2).

I under­stand that there are plug-ins for irssi that per­form a noti­fi­ca­tion
ser­vice or run com­mands on cer­tain cues. If irssi was run­ning local­ly, I
could do all kinds of things with such a fea­ture. If run­ning remote­ly,
how­ev­er, I believe that I am lim­it­ed to noti­fi­ca­tions inside the irssi win­dow
itself. This would force me to man­u­al­ly check the win­dow on a fre­quent basis,
which will either become annoy­ing or be for­got­ten. I would like to have
audio/visual cues to let me know that my atten­tion is required.

[1] http://www.garion.org/irssi/irssi-proxy.php