Overview

WeeChat is a modern IRC client, based on a powerful text-driven interface. It is designed with extensibility in mind, featuring a wide array of options, plug-ins (such as spell checking) and several scripting languages. It allows for multiple connections to multiple servers. WeeChat has UTF-8 support and may use multiple character sets for encoding and decoding messages.

Installation

You will need to install the weechat package.

It should be noted that support from the WeeChat developer is only provided for the latest release and the current development version. Due to differences in the development cycles of WeeChat and Ubuntu the latest WeeChat release is seldom available from the Ubuntu repositories. In order to obtain support it might be necessary to install the latest version of WeeChat from a PPA, details of which can be found by on the WeeChat website.

Using WeeChat

WeeChat is a text-based console application, sometimes called a curses application due to the style of the user interface.

Text-Based version

WeeChat is started by issuing the following command in a terminal window:

weechat

If Unity is being used, the keyboard the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Alt-T will open a terminal window. In Kubuntu, a terminal can be started from the 'K' button and navigating to the Konsole application in the Applications, System menu. Other ways of opening a terminal window are dependent on the desktop environment or flavor of Ubuntu being used.

By default, WeeChat automatically connects to the Libera Chat network, which is used by all of the official Ubuntu IRC channels. Once connected, a unique nickname should be used and can be selected with the command:

/nick newNick

where newNick is the new nickname. To join an IRC channel use the following command:

/join chanName

where chanName is the channel you wish to join. #ubuntu is a popular general Ubuntu help channel.

Comprehensive information regarding use of the Libera Chat network can be found in Libera's web site. The Weechat Quickstart Guide explains how to quickly get WeeChat running for the first time.

Graphical versions

Currently there are no GUI versions of WeeChat available.

Remote GUIs

For details of several remote GUIs that are available for use with WeeChat see the WeeChat FAQ


WeeChat (last edited 2021-07-06 22:27:39 by fitojb)