Lately I’ve finally gone further customizing my desktop than I had ever bothered with before. Previously the most I had ever done was find a visual style, a theme for whichever media player I was using at the time, and a wallpaper. However, for the past month or so now, I’ve been messing around with LiteStep (more on this in a later post), which has really given me the freedom I’ve always been looking for when it comes to customizing my desktop.

LiteStep has been completely amazing and has been such a breath of fresh air for me when it comes to messing with my desktop. I have always been pretty annoyed with XP visual styles. They have always felt so limited, not to mention I’ve always found it pretty hard to find styles that I love every part of (I have been using Ashen for the past several years). Finally with LiteStep I can toss together a mock-up and turn it into a working theme with relative ease. (If only I had gotten around to messing with LiteStep years ago!)

So now that I was messing around with LiteStep and trying to figure out it’s inner workings, IRC became a pretty good resource for getting help and some feedback on the theme I was working on. In the past I had never used any other IRC client besides mIRC (which I was never really a fan of). The major drawback of mIRC for me was it’s interface for configuring the client was a complete and utter mess. 90% of the time wanting to change one option would lead to 10 minutes of digging through windows, menu entries, and other areas trying to remember where you could change that one option.

Now feeling how nice it could be having relatively full control over the look of my desktop, off on my journey I went looking for a new IRC client. I actually ended up being quite surprised with how small pool of options was. The three I came to find were mIRC, X-Chat, and Irssi. X-Chat seemed to be just another mIRC so here I was hoping that Irssi was what I was looking for and indeed it was, with one small catch. I was on XP and Irssi was a UNIX IRC client. I had already been using cygwin for my git needs, so I figured it was worth a shot to check if Irssi was available there. It just so happened that it was.

I now have Irssi setup and working wonderfully. I’d also like to quickly mention that the terminal emulator being used in the shot above is mintty, which has made my experience with cygwin a much better one. My experience with Irssi so far has been great! Easily hundreds of times better than those with mIRC. I love it’s simplicity. I love it’s ability to be customized and it’s functionality extended. The only major annoyance that I’ve encountered is how convoluted and annoying the theming system is.

Irssi themes are made up of defined templates which contain the styling information and formats which define the formats for all the events, messages, and such. Where it gets convoluted is how the templates are nested so deeply. When you’re trying to change one bit, you end up running through these enormous chains of templates trying to find the one you want to change. Where it gets annoying is how the formats are only viewable by typing /format. Non obvious names are also common across formats and templates, so a lot of time is spent trying to find the format for what you want to change and then the appropriate template or sub-template.

Overall Irssi has turned out to be a much better IRC client for me even with it’s convoluted and clunky theming system.