Client Setup

IRC is an open protocol, and as such there are a variety of clients that can connect to Randomus. The following will help you configure some popular clients for use on the network, and get chatting!

Terminal client: WeeChat

WeeChat is a modern text-based IRC client that runs in a terminal. It can be used as your primary standalone client, or it can be used as a connection relay (or “bouncer”), which keeps IRC connections open for another client to connect to and disconnect from without disconnecting from the IRC network. In both situations, it’s recommended to run WeeChat in tmux to keep your IRC connection alive across SSH sessions.

Connecting to the Randomus IRC network

Run the following commands (plus some recommended settings, but use your judgment) to configure your connection to IRC:

/server add Randomus irc.randomus.net/6697 -tls
/set irc.server.Randomus.nicks "yournickname,yournicknamefallback"
/set irc.server.Randomus.autojoin_dynamic on
/set irc.server.Randomus.autoconnect on
/connect Randomus

From here, you can join your desired channel(s), such as #chat or #help, via e.g. /join #help. This is a fine place to ask any questions if you have any. Thanks to the irc.server.Randomus.autojoin_dynamic on setting, these channels will be added to your autojoin list and automatically joined when you restart WeeChat.

By default, you will see a list of windows (and what is in them) on the left side of the screen, e.g. "1.Randomus, 2. #chat, 3. #help". You can change the window being displayed by pressing ALT-Left or ALT-Right to cycle through the windows, or you can type /buffer 2 to display that window (the #chat channel in this example). (The difference between a window and a buffer isn’t important until you get into more advanced usage.)

Relaying

Adding a relay configuration allows you to connect any IRC client to WeeChat, essentially, so that you can (potentially with some SSH tunneling) use said client running at any location to get on IRC and share the persistent connection maintained by WeeChat. This means you could connect Client X to the WeeChat relay, chat for a while, close Client X, and then reconnect it the next day and see all of your missed messages that happened while Client X wasn’t connected (but WeeChat was).

Adding a relay is simple:

/set relay.network.password somepasswordyouwant
/relay add irc.Randomus 16667

This will make WeeChat listen on port 16667, and if another IRC client connects to that port (and supplies the proper password), they can share your WeeChat connection.

More configuration

Sending the /set command to WeeChat will open an interactive menu where you can view and change all the settings. There are a lot, so it’s best to read the WeeChat user's guide.

GUI client: HexChat?

TODO.

More clients