ctrlproxy may not be perfect, but I'm not looking back

Back when I had a computer 24/7 at home, I would irc from there, using irssi inside screen. Using the laptop at home worked fine, since there was no noticeable lag when typing, and I wasn’t away from home that often, so lag in such occasions was acceptable.

Later on, I changed flats and the 24/7 computer could no longer run 24/7, so I moved irssi to a remote computer. Used as I was to no lag at all, this turned out too painful. I ended up with one remote irssi to read backlog, and one local irssi from the laptop, joining and parting as I turned it on and off, or changed networks. This was, er, suboptimal.

Finally, Holger recommended me using an IRC proxy, ctrlproxy in particular. Basically you run it in any 24/7 computer, and then your irc client (not necessarily irssi, mind you) connects to it, instead of directly to the irc server. On connect, ctrlproxy sends you backlog since the last time you quit (but this can be disabled), and after that is transparent.

For me, there’s no looking back, since I hate lag when typing, and I didn’t want to be joining and parting all the time. If you don’t mind lag, or always connect from networks with very low latency, well, consider yourself lucky.