Recently I’ve started playing with the Docker for Mac beta and during my search of what the $#@^ to do with it, came across this awesomeness: docker containers on the desktop. I’m not a total convert (too disorganised/busy/whatever) but have started poking the odd app into containers.

One of these was irssi, which I use with private irc servers.

So I used the official irssi image, put it behind a bash function and voila! Which was very nice and easy, just dump irssi config in $HOME/.irssi as per normal.

But then I decided I wanted to be notified when someone mentioned my nick… I use a Mac, several solutions out on the interweb mention notify scripts and growl - but there’s no real need to use growl with the excellently simple terminal-notifier. With that installed, the irssi fnotify script and a quick bash hack to poll the output, I was sorted. All that was left was to start it when irssi was called, achieved by a simple call at the end of the bash function.