Irssi 1.1.0 Released

Posted on January 15th 2018

Happy new year again from the Irssi Team!

Irssi 1.1.0 has been released. This release is the result of all the contributions Irssi received in the past year. Of course, it includes all the security fixes from Irssi 1.0.6.

Will Storey, Joseph Bisch, Edward Tomasz Napierala and Jari Matitainen contributed to this release and accepted our invitation to join the project, as well as external contributions from Robert Bisewski, Paul Townsend, Oscar Linderholm, Rodrigo Rebello, Stephen Oberholtzer, Paolo Martini, Martijn Dekker, Tim Konick, Hanno Böck, Tristan Pepin Michael Hansen, and Lasse Toimela. In total 151 files changed, with 6214 line insertions and 1062 line deletions. Thanks everyone!

We rushed in some last minute fixes into 1.1.0 so as they wouldn't have to sit on the queue until next year. We hope it doesn't affect stability of the release too much. Thanks for those helping us test by running the Git version!

Some notable changes:

  • /server does not connect to servers anymore, we recommend using /connect! You can also change servers using /server connect
  • /foreach now emits commands instead of sending text to the targets

Some interesting new features:

  • If you use the per window command history, global history can now be accessed with Ctrl+Arrows
  • History entries can now be deleted (e.g. to remove some secrets)
  • East-asian users will enjoy /set break_wide to make words wrap more naturally
  • On FreeBSD, Irssi now supports the Capsicum sandbox (experimental)
  • Lines with certain levels can be hidden from screen (not ignored), using /window hidelevel

Some new developments:

  • Fuzzing code has been added to the repository, which may help find certain kinds of bugs (and already has!)
  • Module authors can now use net_start_ssl for StartTLS (used e.g. by Quassel)
  • Irssi now has a folder for unit tests!

See the NEWS for details.

After installing the new release, you can use /upgrade to re-launch your Irssi binary, but don't forget to /save first. TLS connections will break and require manual /reconnect 1 and so on. To save and restore the window content, load the buf.pl script and make sure it is in autorun. Starting with Irssi 1.1.0, you can also save and restore your command history -- check this comment until someone comes up with a proper script.

We are committed to put security, stability and regression fixes on subsequent 1.1.x releases, as we have done for 1.0.

As usual, there remains a lot to be done. We are always looking for help, so you can check the bugs and see if you can fix some, or implement some of the enhancement requests. The initial version of horizontal splits has already landed in Git and thus should be included in Irssi 1.2.0.

This release can be downloaded from our releases page. Binary test packages for various Linux distributions are automatically generated by the openSUSE Build Service and are available for download in the irssi-test repository.

By the way, test packages for the Git version are also available for download in the irssi-git repository, and an archive of the old stable version is available in irssi-oldtest.

We are also looking for packagers who want to take the challenge of adding compatible builds of irssi-{python,otr,xmpp,icb,quassel,fish,theme-indent,...} to either distributions or the openSUSE Build Service (has to support all our current targets there.)

Feel welcome to join our IRC channel, or discuss this news, on reddit.

The Irssi Team.