I have long been using Irssi running in a screen as my IRC client of choice. Lately I have also been putting ZNC in between to also be able to connect from my iPhone, iPad and nice graphical OSX clients. But somehow I always end up going back to irssi. The one thing I am missing though is the instant notification when something happens which might need my attention. The nice things you get with GUI clients like bouncing dock icons, ping sounds and growl notifications. I know there are a lot of solutions for this, but I kind of didn't feel like constantly parsing a logfile over SSH to get notifications.

And I REALLY wanted to play with ZeroMQ.

irssi-zeromq is an irssi plugin, inspired by fnotify, which subscribes to irssi events and distributes them via ZeroMQ pub/sub. Notification handlers just subscribe to the socket, get notified about events and can be written in any language. If you have irssi running on a remote system, just change the socket to use TCP and your golden.

Writing messages to stdout with Python:

import sys
import zmq

context = zmq.Context()
socket = context.socket(zmq.SUB)
socket.connect ("ipc://irssi.ipc")
socket.setsockopt(zmq.SUBSCRIBE, 'irssi')

print socket.recv()

Display a growl notification with Ruby:

require 'rubygems'
require 'ffi-rzmq'

context = ZMQ::Context.new(1)
subscriber = context.socket(ZMQ::SUB)
subscriber.connect("ipc://irssi.ipc")
subscriber.setsockopt(ZMQ::SUBSCRIBE, "irssi")

s = ''
subscriber.recv_string(s)
system("growlnotify -t irssi -m \"#{s}\"")

I think you get the idea. Now it's super easy to write notification subscribers in any language you like. Go forth and subscribe.

• the perl ZeroMQ module from CPAN

• emit the actual irssi event as pub channel
• emit more events

• Bugs

• Thorsten Leemhuis for fnotify
• ZeroMQ for being awesome