Repartee

A modern terminal IRC client built with Rust, Ratatui, and Tokio.

Inspired by irssi. Designed for the future.

Demo

Terminal, mobile web, and desktop web — all in real-time sync:

TUI (left) | Mobile web (center) | Desktop web (right) — 1:1 state sync across all interfaces.

Features

• Full IRC protocol — channels, queries, CTCP, TLS, channel modes, ban/except/invex lists
• IRCv3 — server-time, echo-message, away-notify, account-notify, chghost, multi-prefix, BATCH netsplit grouping, message-tags, and more
• SASL — PLAIN, EXTERNAL (client certificate), and SCRAM-SHA-256
• irssi-style navigation — Esc+1–9 window switching, aliases, familiar /commands
• Mouse support — click buffers and nicks, scroll chat history
• Lua 5.4 scripting — event bus, custom commands, full IRC and state access, sandboxed per-script environments
• Persistent logging — SQLite with WAL, FTS5 full-text search, optional AES-256-GCM encryption
• Netsplit detection — batches join/part floods into single events
• Flood protection — blocks CTCP spam and nick-change floods automatically
• Nick coloring — deterministic per-nick colors (WeeChat-style) with HSL hue wheel for truecolor, 256-color and 16-color fallbacks, auto-detected terminal capability, configurable saturation/lightness
• Theming — irssi-compatible format strings with 24-bit color support and custom abstracts
• Web frontend — built-in HTTPS web UI with mobile support, real-time sync with the terminal, swipe gestures, 5 themes
• DCC CHAT — direct client-to-client messaging with active and passive (reverse) connections
• Spell check — inline correction with Hunspell dictionaries, multilingual, Tab to cycle suggestions, computing/IT dictionary with 7,400+ terms, replace and highlight modes
• Embedded shell — full PTY terminal inside Repartee (/shell) — run vim, btop, irssi without leaving the client. Also available in the web frontend via beamterm WebGL2 renderer with Nerd Font, mouse selection, Ctrl+/- font resize, and clipboard paste
• Detach & reattach — detach from your terminal and reattach later; IRC connections stay alive
• Extban — $a:account ban type with /ban -a shorthand
• Single binary — ~20MB (SQLite, Lua, and WASM frontend bundled). Runtime dependency: libchafa (image rendering)

Installation

Pre-built binaries

Download from GitHub Releases:

From crates.io

cargo install repartee

From source

git clone https://github.com/outragedevs/repartee.git
cd repartee
cargo build --release
./target/release/repartee

Requirements

• Runtime: libchafa >= 1.8.0 (image rendering) — brew install chafa / apt install libchafa-dev / pkg install chafa
• Build: Rust 1.85+ (2024 edition) — install via rustup
• A terminal with 256-color or truecolor support (iTerm2, Alacritty, kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, Subterm, etc.)
• A modern web browser for the web frontend (optional)

Quick Start

Launch repartee:

repartee

Add a server and connect:

/server add libera irc.libera.chat
/connect libera
/join #repartee

Or edit ~/.repartee/config.toml directly:

[servers.libera]
label    = "Libera"
address  = "irc.libera.chat"
port     = 6697
tls      = true
autoconnect = true
channels = ["#repartee"]

Key Bindings

Directory Layout

~/.repartee/
  config.toml        # main configuration
  .env               # credentials (SASL passwords, log encryption key)
  themes/            # custom .theme files
  scripts/           # Lua scripts
  logs/messages.db   # chat logs (SQLite)
  sessions/          # Unix sockets for detached sessions

Sessions & Detach

repartee can run in the background while you close your terminal:

# Detach: press Ctrl+Z or type /detach — terminal is restored
# Reattach from any terminal:
repartee a

# Or start headless (no terminal needed):
repartee -d
repartee a       # attach when ready

Everything survives detach — IRC connections, scrollback, scripts, and channel state.

Scripting

Scripts are Lua 5.4 files placed in ~/.repartee/scripts/:

meta = {
    name        = "hello",
    version     = "1.0",
    description = "Greet users on join",
}

function setup(api)
    api.on("irc.join", function(event)
        if event.nick ~= api.our_nick() then
            api.irc.say(event.channel, "Welcome, " .. event.nick .. "!")
        end
    end)
end

Load at runtime:

/script load hello

Or autoload in config:

[scripts]
autoload = ["hello"]

Theming

Themes are TOML files in ~/.repartee/themes/ using irssi-compatible format strings with 24-bit color extensions:

[colors]
bg        = "1a1b26"
fg        = "a9b1d6"
highlight = "e0af68"
nick_self = "7aa2f7"

[abstracts]
pubmsg  = "{pubmsgnick $0}$1"
own_msg = "{ownmsgnick $0}$1"

Set the active theme:

[general]
theme = "mytheme"

Documentation

Full documentation is available at repart.ee/docs.

• Installation
• Quick Start
• Configuration
• Themes
• Commands
• Web Frontend
• Sessions & Detach
• Lua Scripting
• Lua API Reference
• Logging & Search

License

MIT — see LICENSE.