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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

You mean you actually keep a chat window open all day long? Isn't that ridiculously distracting?

I check my email twice a day, and HN the same. Anything else that could potentially distract me from what I'm doing gets turned off. I couldn't imagine giving random strangers the ability to intrude into my train of thought whenever they wanted.

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My irssi remains open all the time I'm in front of the computer - Shadowcat's primary internal co-ordination means is IRC, plus I'm on a dozen or so irc.perl.org channels, plus a handful on freenode.

It does not, however, alert me in any way as to whether somebody's tried to contact me or not - so it only gets my attention when I want it to, usually because I'm thinking about something and can type responses on autopilot while I do.

Where I work we use IRC as the main way to communicate (we all telecommute) and I have a window open all day long. The secret? Tell your IRC client to make a noise whenever someone mentions your IRC nick and then ignore the IRC window until it makes the noise. Works like a charm and allows me to focus on the task at hand.

I use an IRC bouncer to stay logged in to the IRC servers. I connect to the bouncer, which replays anything I missed on the IRC server while I'm not logged in to the bouncer.

If you have a shell account or a vps you could just keep running irssi or weechat inside screen or tmux.

I do this. But I have a really hard time segmenting conversations. So I end up with large logs and no way to read them.

I wish there was a way to say, "show me everything from the current conversation alone". Maybe by tracking @replies or something.

Can you share the name of the bouncer? Sounds like nice functionality...

I personally use ZNC and I love it.

I'm using bip IRC proxy and I have no complaints. (couldn't get secure connection working with freenode the last time I tried it).

I use znc running on a slice. (http://en.znc.in/wiki/ZNC)

I've also heard of Bip (http://bip.t1r.net/), but I've never used it.

What exactly is "running on a slice"?

Slice = virtual server at http://www.slicehost.com/

exactly what wrs said.

I run znc on a small VPS instance that is always running, always up, so I don't have to worry about keeping my connection to an IRC server open. ZNC (the bouncer) keeps me logged in to the IRC server, and I connect to ZNC when I need to be in contact with others.

Thanks I started using ZNC since yesterday. Finding it awesome!

I use irssi-proxy, so I can both log in from SSH and write as well as connect via a local IRC client to it.

It's only distracting if you allow it to distract you.

I keep it running in a seperate screen session that I open occasionally throughout the day.

Just have the irc window on a separate virtual desktop.

I run ERC in Emacs - background buffers - all day long.

I wanted to second this. I do the same thing. We use IRC at my company and we all work remotely. Having IRC in my editor makes things much simpler since I can easily copy/paste code, visit links and generally stay in one environment all day.

I keep the client running in the background (not even minimized). I have it set to save a log of all chats. I occasionally glance through those logs 2-3 times during the day. That's also the same frequency with which I check my mail.

You apparently have ADD. You should seek help. There is a difference in preventing distraction and people "intruding" your thought process. I shut a lot of things off (preventing distraction) as well during the day (including Mail at times), however, IRC doesn't "intrude" in my daily work, it just sits there, open, and I check it when I can, participate in a conversation, and move on.

Minimize it to the tray.

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