How to use Weechat, the IRC client in Termux

Hello everyone~~

This is IRISnoir from Hackingarise. Bringing another Termux tutorial. This time about Weechat.

Brief description of its usage:
You want to talk to your friends. But you don’t want the usual, boring, tame Calibri text. You want something new, something fresh. And don’t want your phone storage to be cramped by such fillers for the chatting app? Why not try the fancy, fast, light and extensible Weechat. It only needs 5MB. That is deeply low. If you want to waste some more storage then you can install the plugins.
Weechat is very easy to use and is very user-friendly. That is why I recommend it.
You can, of course, read more about it here.

Now, on to its usage:
First, install it via:
$ pkg install weechat
If you want, you can install the plugins too with:
$ pkg install weechat-lua-plugin
$ pkg install weechat-perl-plugin
$ pkg install weechat-python-plugin
$ pkg install weechat-ruby-plugin
Of course, this is optional. Meaning it’s ok to not install them.

Now, to use it is super easy:
Just type:
weechat
And now a new UI has opened.

You can notice that triggering your smartphone keyboard isn’t possible in the Weechat UI. So if you want to enable/disable the keyboard, swipe from left side of the screen to the right and press ‘KEYBOARD’.

Now that you know how to work the keyboard, you can now work with the commands. Attention: commands must always start with a forward slash a.k.a /. The basic commands that you need to know are:

/server add [NAME] [SERVER]
Servers don’t come generated by themselves in the Weechat list. That’s why you need to manually add them into the list via that command.

/server list
To list all avalible servers. You need to add them first.

/server del [NAME]
Erase a saved server from the list. This command is utilized when you make a typo while attempting to add a server to the list.

/connect [NAME or SERVER]
To connect to a server.
Specify NAME: means that you want to connect to a server with a saved name.
Specify SERVER: means that you want to connect to a server but you don’t want the server to be saved in list.

/list
List all channels in a server. After when you are connected of course.

/join [CHANNEL]
To join a channel after when you are connected to a server.
Attention: a channel name must have a hashtag (#) at the start to be considered valid.

That’s the basic commands. You can always view all commands in the help list via:
/help.
And see the basic syntax of a command by:
/help [COMMAND]

Weechat provide the touchscreen feature. Meaning that you can use your fingers to swipe the contents up or down, a.k.a scroll it.

Scripts can be used to enhance the experience. To open the script list, use:
/script
Look at the bar at the top, it will provide help. Scroll the bar left to right with F9 and F10.
Attention: You must install plugins in order for them to work. The plugin name must correspond to the script extension:
Example:
– Python plugin will enable scripts with .py extension
– Perl plugin will enable scripts with .pl extension
– Ruby plugin will enable scripts with .rb extension

You can set and modify the Weechat settings. To open the settings list, use:
/fset
Again, look at the top bar, it will provide help.
Attention: Be careful as you modify them. A wrong move might break the whole thing down and render it unusable unless you reinstall Weechat.

Here are a few IRC servers that I know:
EFNet – ssl.efnet.org
EsperNet – irc.esper.net
Freenode – chat.freenode.net
GameSurge – irc.gamesurge.net
IRCnet – open.ircnet.net
IRCSource – irc.ircsource.net
NetFuze – irc.netfuze.net
OFTC – irc.oftc.net
QuakeNet – irc.quakenet.org
Rizon – irc.rizon.net
SDF – irc.sdf.org

Fun fact: You can even run it via Proxychains-ng to increase anonymity.

Thank you for reading this tutorial. I hope you have a nice day.