irssi-tcl is a module for the Irssi IRC client. It lets Irssi support scripting with Tcl.

Why? Irssi supports Perl scripting in its core. However I am a fan of the Tcl language, and I've written many IRC related scripts for the Eggdrop IRC bot. With some effort, you can even update Eggdrop scripts to run on Irssi.

It also solved a particular problem I had where I wanted to easily use non-blocking I/O, such as for HTTP requests. Tcl supports this pattern very easily through its event loop. This makes using Tcl through this module an easy way to talk to HTTP servers.

The module works by loading a Tcl interpreter into Irssi. You can use th /tcl command to interact with this interpreter. The module also supports loading scripts.

Available scripts

I've written a number of scripts using this module. You can find them in this repository.

Another is irssi-strava.

Requirements

To build the module you need:

• Irssi and Irssi development files
  • Debian packages: irssi irssi-dev
• glib2 and glib2 development files
  • Debian packages: libglib2.0-0 libglib2.0-dev
• Tcl 8.5+ and Tcl 8.5+ development files (8.5 and 8.6 both work).
  • Debian packages: tcl8.5-dev tcl8.5
• GNU Make (gmake)
  • Debian packages: build-essential (well this will get Make among other things)

It's possible it will work with older Tcl versions, but I haven't tested this.

Building

These commands must be run in the src directory.

Linux:

make

FreeBSD:

gmake -f Makefile.FreeBSD

Didn't work? If building fails, check the included (-I) directories listed in the Makefile actually exist. They may be at a different location on your system (such as in /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib). You will need to alter them until they are all correct if they are not. Feel free to ask me for help.

Building with debug (which only really alters script/module paths right now):

make -e DEBUG=-DDEBUG

Installation

Linux:

make install

FreeBSD:

make -f Makefile.FreeBSD install

The install will place libtcl.so in ~/.irssi/modules and Tcl scripts into ~/.irssi/tcl.

Alternatively you can manually copy libtcl.so where you would like it. However, the module always looks in ~/.irssi/tcl for scripts.

Usage

To load the module in Irssi:

/load tcl

To autoload the module at startup of Irssi:

echo "load tcl" >> ~/.irssi/startup

The scripts that are loaded automatically are listed in ~/.irssi/tcl/scripts.conf.

Alternatively, a script in ~/.irssi/tcl/ can be loaded via

/tcl load_script name_of_script.tcl

Commands

Run a command in the Tcl interpreter:

/tcl <command ...>

Reload Tcl scripts:

/tcl reload

Examples

/tcl set a [expr 5+5]
13:53 -!- Tcl: Running /tcl: 'set a [expr 5+5]'
13:53 -!- Tcl: Result: 10

/tcl set a
13:53 -!- Tcl: Running /tcl: 'set a'
13:53 -!- Tcl: Result: 10

See the "tcl" section in Irssi's /set for individual Tcl script settings.

Scripting

See docs/scripting.md.

Using (edited) Eggdrop scripts

See docs/eggdrop_scripts.md.