irssi? in MY notifications center?

As I've said before, I'm constantly working in the shell and have found many ways to improve my flow since I began working this way. I also like to keep in contact on IRC to give out help on Ruby, JS or Rails (and constantly learn in the process), chat with friends, or discuss open-source projects. I use irssi to connect to Freenode, a shell client, and I wondered if it would be possible to get Notifications Center to listen in on my chats and let me know when I get new messages. Thanks to alloy's powerful terminal-notifier, I can!

Like I said, I run irssi through my own VPS which is running an irssi-proxy to keep me connected all the time. This way, connections to chat are speedy and efficient, and people can contact me whenever they want...I'll see it when I get online. I've also begun to wrestle with a project called [bitlbee][bitl] that connects to XMPP chats, so I can talk with my co-workers with my IRC client...but I haven't been able to get that up and running...maybe soon...

Anyway, this post is about getting Mac OS Notifications for your irssi mentions and private messages.

requirements

installation

First, install the necessary packages with Homebrew:

$ brew install irssi terminal-notifier

Make sure your scripts directory is in place:

$ mkdir -p ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun

Then, install the trigger.pl script to your irssi config directory.

$ curl 'http://scripts.irssi.org/scripts/trigger.pl' -o ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/trigger.pl

Now you can open up irssi and type /LOAD trigger to enable triggers!

The triggers I used for building this feature are below. Just change the -regexp pattern to your nick instead of 'tubbo' to get it working right:

-privmsgs -command 'exec /usr/local/bin/terminal-notifier -message "$\M" -title "$\N"'
-publics -regexp 'tubbo' -command 'exec /usr/local/bin/terminal-notifier -message "$\M" -title "$\N ($\C)"'

You should be able to just paste those lines into ~/.irssi/triggers (a file you create), then run /TRIGGER LOAD from irssi to get the triggers working.

And that should do it! Get one of your friends to /msg you or say your name in a channel!

one small caveat

Currently, all spaces are escaped in the notification. Makes it a bit harder to read, but it still works. If anyone out there knows of a great solution, hit me up on Twitter (@tubbo) and let me know about it!

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