thl's irssi notification script [UPDATED]

A while ago Luke Macken wrote an irssi notification script and blogged about it. I really liked the idea having pop-ups (using libnotify) on all of my desktops when somebody mentions my name in on of the channels. But well, the script had one big problem for me: It requires irssi to run on the local machine.

But I run irssi within screen on another machine in another network – I just ssh into that machine normally and resume the irssi-session with "screen -R". Thus I could not use lmacken's script :-(

I looked a bit more into that some time ago and came up with another solution: fnotify. Download it and put it as fnotify.pl in .irssi/scripts/ and load it in irssi with

/load perl
/script load fnotify

Is somebody chats to you directly (query) or mentions your nick somewhere in one of the channels it will put something like

#fedora-devel foo> ping thl

into ~/.irssi/fnotify . I can read that file from the client via ssh now and fire up notify-send locally. I use this startup script do realize that:

# yes, we need a way to flush the file on disconnect; i don't know one
# yes, that's flush is not atomic (but good enough for me)
ssh remote.system.somewhere "tail -n 10 .irssi/fnotify ; : > .irssi/fnotify ; tail -f .irssi/fnotify " | sed -u 's/[<@&]//g' | while read heading message  do  notify-send -i gtk-dialog-info -t 300000 -- "${heading}" "${message}"; done # the sed -u 's/[<@&]//g' is needed as those characters might confuse  notify-send (FIXME: is that a bug or a feature?)

This results is nice pop-ups in the bottom right corner of my desktop:

Site note: Yes, there are probably 1000 other ways to realize something like that. The above stuff is far from perfect, but it suits my needs.