Posted in Command-line Interface

WeeChat Using Wrong Nick After SASL Auth

Slack is great... for work. Discord is sufficient enough. Sadly, I've never really found any community servers I have enjoyed. It also doesn't help that age verification is now a thing.

I've been of age for longer than I haven't, so that's not really the issue. My issue is with possibly needing to provide sensitive PII to a third-party company. Breaches are more frequent than ever, so I've started to be extra careful with what I share.

I'm also fortunate to have a buddy that reminds me that IRC still exists.

I already have some history with IRC. I frequented Undernet because it had an "elite" sounding name. I've jumped between EFnet and DALnet, and even Freenode before it evidently went to complete shit.

Said buddy lurks on Libera.Chat, safety in numbers, I opted to hang out on there. I've run through the gamut of GUI IRC clients as well. They are fine, but nothing GUI has ever felt as awesome as mIRC. Legitimately considering running it in Wine just for kicks.

In no particular order, here's some notes on my brief foray:

So after a week of setting up ZNC and fighting with all of the GUI clients, I decided to switch gears and try out some TUI options. No stranger to BitchX, because it too sounded "elite", I was sad to see that it's been over a decade since its last update. I mean, it makes sense, IRC isn't dropping features that need to be adopted, but also, I have to imagine it'll stop working eventually.

There are a few modern TUI IRC clients, but I went with WeeChat. Seemed like it was a bit more actively maintained than Irssi. Also, I don't like the "RSS" part of the name of Irssi. Odd, I know, but still my personal preference on the matter.

WeeChat was a treat to setup, thanks to an awesome guide on the Libera.Chat website. I went through the steps and BOOM! I was connected.

But then I noticed that my nick was "josh2" rather than "joshtronic". I checked my settings, I was authenticating correctly with my account name. Much confuse. I dug around in the configuration files a bit, and found that in ~/.config/weechat/irc.conf there were a few peculiar lines, most notably:

nicks = "${username},${username}2,${username}3,${username}4,${username}5"

Seemed that ${username} was sourcing the username on my machine, which is in fact "josh" and not "joshtronic". Going against the wishes of the configuration file, I made some changes directly and eventually figured out how to connect with the correct nick.

Note: You don't want to edit the file directly because it doesn't hot reload and exiting the client will overwrite your changes. You can be methodical though, exit the client, edit the file, start the client.

Then I took a bit more time to figure out the correct way to do it inside of WeeChat. From within WeeChat you can set the default nicks, or set the nicks for the server you're using. I opted to do it for Libera.Chat:

/set irc.server.libera.nicks "nick,nick2,nick3,nick4,nick5"
/save

Next time you jump in and connect, you should have the proper nick set, rather than your system's username.