erssi Shellter Edition keeps your nick, gathers your mentions, encrypts what you ask it to and updates itself from signed releases. No root needed.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/y-o-o-z/erssi/main/shellter-install.sh | sh
Everything erssi brings stays: side panels, mouse support, 24-bit colour, image preview, a web frontend and irssi's Perl scripts. This edition adds the rest, and every command has a page in /help.
RPE2E natively, wire-compatible with repartee and its WeeChat and irssi scripts: XChaCha20-Poly1305 with per-sender keys, given only to people you accept. A message that cannot be read is never hidden. It protects what you say, not who talks to whom, and it has no forward secrecy.
Your windows on the left and the channel's nicks by rank on the right. Saved layouts come back after a restart exactly as they were.
/keepnick takes it back the moment it is free: through MONITOR where the server offers it, otherwise ISON.
Private messages, notices from people and hilights in one window and a log, with a desktop notification through the terminal, also inside tmux.
The shellter theme puts messages, events and replies under one separator, in the colours of shellter.me; shellter-light for light terminals.
/search looks through the logs of a channel or every network in a separate process, so erssi carries on.
The full list: features.md.
erssi keeps running in tmux on your shell account. Reach the same session from a narrow ssh window or from a browser.
Run it on your shell account. It goes to ~/.local/opt/erssi and keeps its settings in ~/.erssi, so it runs next to irssi.
It checks your system, the release's signature and the package before anything in your home changes.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/y-o-o-z/erssi/main/shellter-install.sh | sh
The session survives logging out. The first start asks for a network, a nick and the theme, then connects.
tmux new -s irc erssi
Then /upgrade in the running erssi keeps your windows; TLS connections reconnect once.
erssi --check-update erssi --update
A ready-made binary, in seconds, installed only when the signature on its SHA256SUMS, its checksum and its manifest check out. The previous release stays for --rollback.
Built from the newest signed release, with the test suite, in about two minutes. Needs GLib 2.70 or newer; missing packages are named for your administrator.
The installer carries the release key and the commit of every release, and installs nothing that does not match. You can check the same things by hand.
git -c gpg.program=false -c gpg.openpgp.program=false \
-c gpg.x509.program=false -c gpg.format=ssh \
-c gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile=utils/allowed_signers \
verify-tag shellter-v2026.10.6
Run it in a clone of the repository; gpg is switched off so that only the SSH key counts. It must report a good signature with the fingerprint on the right. Compare it with one you got another way, for example by asking on #shellter.
The network-facing parts are reviewed, fuzzed and tested under sanitizers. What is protected and what is not.
Released on 25 October 2026: fixes from a full review of 2026.10.5.
Nothing reaches your terminal raw. Control characters from the network are drawn as ? on every terminal type, so a channel name cannot set your clipboard or window title.
--uninstall removes only its own files. Libraries and man pages of other software in the same prefix stay, and the installer names what it left.
A web frontend that holds under load. Too many new connections from one address are closed before TLS starts; new certificates get a random serial, the extensions browsers expect and 825 days.
Steadier encryption. Key requests have a budget per sender, the keyring is cached, and freed plaintext is wiped.
A safer /upgrade. It checks that it can write the session file first, and a failed /upgrade sends nothing twice.
man erssi. A manual page of its own, linked for an install in your home.
The channel of shellter.me on IRCnet, where the Shellter Edition is made. Bugs and ideas can also go to the issue tracker.
# in erssi
/connect IRCnet
/join #shellter