When it comes to IRC clients in Windows, your choices are fairly slim. There’s mIRC which has been around forever and costs $20 to purchase, XChat which is free under Linux but like mIRC costs $20 for use on the Windows platform, and IceChat which works fine but looks like something out of the Windows 98 days. After that you have your “instant messengers with IRC capability” like Miranda, Pidgin and if I’m not mistaken Trillian still is IRC-able. Finally, you have Chatzilla, a Firefox add-on.

IRC as you know is just text. Always has been, always will be. There is literally no legitimate need for a GUI when it comes to IRC chatting – and it adds insult to injury when you have a GUI-based IRC client that’s munching up memory left and right.

There are times when you just have to say to hell with the GUI and use something completely text-based. For IRC, the best software for this is irssi.

Installing and running irssi

The best way to install and run irssi in Windows is via Cygwin. Cygwin is a Linux-ish environment for the Windows platform. When installed it’s just a shortcut on your desktop that brings up a Command Prompt-like window where you can do Linux type things in it.

When installing Cygwin and you come to the portion where you select packages you want to install, simply search for irssi and select it.

Example:

Where the tiny “n/a” is shown is where a checkbox would be to install it. It shows n/a because I already had it installed at the time I took this screen shot.

Once installed you can simply run irssi from within Cygwin.

Is Cygwin a “heavy” program?

No, and in fact will probably be one of the lightest you ever run. Cygwin with irssi running within it usually takes less than 2,000 K of memory. To put this in perspective, Microsoft IntelliPoint mouse software takes up more memory (around 8,000 K)  with its resident ipoint.exe. Believe me, Cygwin is as light as a feather when running, so even if you have a very slow computer box, you’ll be just fine.

Quick primer on how to use irssi

Plenty of documentation is available on irssi, but here’s the super-fast way of doing it via Cygwin in the Windows environment:

GETTING STARTED

Set your chat name:

/set nick your-chat-name-here

Set your alternative chat name:

/set alternate_nick your-chat-name-here

Set your user name:

/set user_name your-user-name

Set your real name:

/set real_name your-real-name-here

Save all the settings you just changed (which you should do):

/save

CONNECTING AND BASIC NAVIGATION

Connect to a server:

/server irc.server.name.here

Join a channel:

/join #channel-name-here

Leaving a channel:

/leave #channel-name-here

Move between “windows”:

When you join a channel after connecting to an IRC server, you officially have two “windows” open at that point. Moving to window 1 is ALT+1. Moving to window 2 is ALT+2. If a third window is opened (such as joining another channel on the same server,) that would be ALT+3.

CUSTOMIZING COLORS

The irssi software uses themes for color customization. Many themes are available for download here. You can also create your own if you wish. The default theme is located in the ~/.irssi/ directory. In the Windows environment assuming a default Cygwin installation, the location is:

C:\cygwin\home\Your-Windows-Username\.irssi

…and the default theme file is called default.theme. You can edit that file directly with a text editor even while Cygwin is running, such as with Notepad. The default.theme file has many comments in it so you know exactly what you’re editing.

More documentation on everything to do with irssi is here.

Final notes

The irssi software can be classified as easy and not easy at the same time.

irssi is easy because as far as text-based software goes, this is pretty darned good. There is nothing in irssi I found that’s too “out there” for anyone to learn. Granted, you do have to have at least some experience on a command line, and if you’ve used IRC before you more or less already do.

In addition, the best feature of irssi is what it doesn’t do. The software absolutely does not do anything behind your back, so to speak. You can also let irssi sit there in a Cygwin window running indefinitely because it uses so little memory. The chance of Cygwin or irssi spiraling out of control in memory usage is basically nil.

irssi is not easy because it’s text-based. Some people simply cannot use software if it doesn’t involve a mouse. If you’re of that type, irssi is not for you.

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