---
author: ~alexlehm
published: true
title: getting started with weechat on a tilde machine
description: run weechat as a local irc client
category:
    - main
---

If you want to run irc on your tilde account, you can use weechat
which is installed and requires minimal configuration.

## First connection

Start weechat on your linux shell and type the following commands:

    /server add tilde irc.tilde.chat/6697 -tls
    /connect tilde

If you are using weechat 3.x, the command uses **-ssl** instead of
**-tls**.

This will connect you to the irc network via a secure connection. The
username used is your linux account, this has to be unique, if someone
else registered your name already and is online you will be called
**username1** or similar, then you should choose another nickname. You
do that with

    /nick newusername

(If you didn't choose a username that is unique in the tilde network,
you had kind of bad luck.)

## Register

You now can register your username using your tilde email address as
described here: [intro to nicks](nicks)

## Setting login credentials

After you have done that, you can set the username and password in the
weechat settings to automatically log in and authenticate

    /set irc.server.tilde.sasl_username <username>
    /set irc.server.tilde.sasl_password <password>

Or to store the password securely (which is preferred), you can use
secure settings like this

    /secure passphrase <passphrase>
    /secure set tilde_password <password>
    /set irc.server.tilde.sasl_password "${sec.data.tilde_password}"

Then the client will ask you for the passphrase when starting.

Now disconnect and connect again to get your registered nickname

    /quit

run **weechat** again and then connect with

    /connect tilde

## What now

Now you can join any channel, e.g. **#helpdesk**

You can set various parameters, e.g. to set your real name displayed
in /whois you can use

    /set irc.server.tilde.realname "My real name"

You can join multiple channels with /j #channel or start private
conversations with /msg nickname and navigate between the different
windows with Control-n and Control-p

To automatically connect to the tilde server on startup use

    /set irc.server.tilde.autoconnect on

For more information about weechat, see the
[manual](https://weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_user.en.html)