Irssi settings and Bash's Environment variables

A much better way would be to set all these settings to your irssi config file. For example, this command will change the nickname:

/set nick Heoa

And every time you start irssi, this nickname will be used.


If you still want it - irssi supports these environment variables:

  • IRCNICK - nick
  • IRCNAME - real_name (the ircname line in /whois output)
  • IRCUSER - user_name (also called ident)
  • IRCHOST - hostname (you will probably never use this one)

Note that these environment variables are only set on the first run, and they are ignored if ~/.irssi/config exists.


The settings for Irssi go in ~/.irssi/config.

However, in general, any Bash environment variable is set in ~/.bashrc like this:

export varname=value

The real question is how do you get Irssi to use those variables?