WeeChat, IRC client from the command line

In this article we are going to see an application with which you can communicate with the world from the terminal. This app is weechat. This is a fast, lightweight, and extensible chat client that works on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Unix, BSD, and GNU Hurd.

To begin I want to clarify that a real-time communication network is called IRC where you can talk to multiple users at the same time. These users are connected to one of the many IRC networks. This was the most before the arrival of Facebook, Messenger and other social networks. An IRC client is simply a program with which to connect to one of these networks. There are many clients, some more complicated to use than others but with more features available to the user.

WeeChat is a lightweight IRC client for the command line, available as free software. While the Ubuntu repositories only provide an old version, here we will see how to install the latest version of this application through its official repository for Ubuntu and derivatives.

General features of WeeChat

• This chat client has a lightweight core that gives us the option to add optional add-ons.
• You can add functionalities if you know how to program a little. This program is extensible with C, Python, Perl, Ruby, Lua, Tcl, Scheme and Javascript.
• This app is fully documented and translated into multiple languages. Here you can take a look at its documentation.
• An active project with a great community that provides quite a lot of scripts for user use.
• It is a free program launched under the GPLv3 license.

The latest stable version so far is WeeChat 1.9. It provides more functionality than its previous version. You can check the details of this new version from their website, in which you will find them well detailed.

Install WeeChat from its official repository

To install this chat client, we will only have to open the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) or looking for "Terminal" from the application launcher. When it opens, you will only have to follow the following steps one by one:

First we are going to execute the following command to add the application repository to our list:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://weechat.org/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/weechat.list'

Now we are going to add the repository key through the command:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 11E9DE8848F2B65222AA75B8D1820DB22A11534E

Once the repository key has been added, update the application through the Software Updater (Update Manager) if you have an older version installed. If you did not have this program installed, from the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) you can execute the following commands to update the repositories on your computer and install the latest version of this client:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install weechat

For those who want to install the latest development version (2.0 so far), they will just have to change the latest command to weechat-devel. But as I have already said, this last one is a development version, so no one should be surprised by the problems it can generate.

For more functionality of this IRC client, it is recommended that users install the packages weechat-scripts y weechat-plugins. Even though when I installed them, weechat-plugins didn't need to be installed.

Start WeeChat

According to its website, it is It is recommended to use this program from an emulated terminal for X (but it is not essential). Rxvt-unicode: has good support for UTF-8, and does not give problems with the default keyboard shortcuts.

To launch the application, from the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) we will only have to call the application by calling it by its name:

weechat

If you want a little more information about how to use this chat client, you will see many of your options from your official documentation.

Uninstall WeeChat

To remove Weechat from the system, just open the terminal (Ctrl + Atl + T) and from there execute the following command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove weechat

To eliminate the official repository of the application, we can do it through the Software & Updates utility in the Other software tab. With this we will clean our system.