IRSSI: Hilighting your nick

I'm still - and proudly - using irc for daily contact with my team mates and it's perfectly fine for our purposes. Well, I miss so much a couple of things (like edit a message with typos or the ability to easily share a photo/screenshot) but we're witty enough to manage among us. Other than that it's really fun.

Lately, due the amount of log, I've found something a bit weird with my irssi config when my is mentioned. I have a couple of perl scripts that sends me a notification to the phone when someone writes my nick and it seemed to me that it was working randomly but... it wasn't.

Just in case you're wondering about that scripts, I have two, one of them working with Android devices called irssinotifier.pl and as I've lately switched to iOS I got prowl.pl (not free but it's so cheap) as the other one working in the Apple world.

What was the problem then? It seems that irssi was highlighting only when someone mentioned me at the beginning of the phrase like this r0sk: but it wasn't doing it in a normal nick mention in the middle of a sentence like hey r0sk sup there!? or similar.

I knew that something like this could be configured so reading a bit about irssi hilight found the way to be alerted even if they are shouting r000ssskkk!! to me, the solution can be applied in two ways, in the irssi command line:

/hilight -regexp r0+s+k+

And, of course, in the .irssi/config file, because if you have put it in the command line and the setting is not saved to the config file, it won't work in case of restart:

hilights = (
  { text = "r0+s+k+"; nick = "yes"; word = "yes"; regexp = "yes"; }
)

And that's the reason why my phone would beep even if you get so angry with me.

About the author

Óscar
has doubledaddy super powers, father of Hugo and Nico, husband of Marta, *nix user, Djangonaut and open source passionate.