Unofficial Ubuntu Assistance

As the launch of a new service I created, UUA, nears its launch, I thought I’d write up on what it’s all about right here.

Using /trigger in irssi to bypass color filters

Yes, we all either love or hate the coloring system. Personally, I think it’s perfectly fine in a social setting, but obnoxious in formal areas. It’s almost as if you just decided to talk in “gangsta” dialect during an important meeting.

Thankfully IRC rooms usually don’t host important meetings. Unfortunately many rooms disable coloring. I thought, wouldn’t it be fun if you could get the clients to understand a whole different color language to get around that.

And I did. Anything that says ]# gets translated into the corresponding Ctrl+# combination (last table on this page). Here’s how:

1. Use irssi. Yes, you have to. It’s one of the most customizable clients, as you can tell just by this blog post. I love it. You’ll love it. We’ll all hug trees. *wink*
2. Grab the irssi trigger script and stick it in your .irssi/scripts folder. I recommend you symlink it into the .irssi/scripts/autoload directory as well so it’s always running every time you launch irssi.
3. Once you’ve got it in your folder, and you’ve loaded irssi, run the following command to make sure the trigger script is active:

   /script load trigger

4. OK, now type in the following and hit ENTER:

   /trigger add -all -regexp '\](\d+)' -replace '\x03$1'

5. Done! While your outgoing messages won’t be colorful for you, your recipients will see the color (edit: as long as they also have this trigger), and other messages sent to you will be colorized if they use the ]# syntax.

If you want the bold, underline, etc., you can add those pretty easily as well. However, colors are good enough for me.

Unofficial Ubuntu Assistance: #uua

I’ve written a nice little IRC bot for #uua (a new idea I’ve had, more on that in a later post) but I can’t host it, and it’s insanely expensive to host it elsewhere. What’s a computer user to do about that?…