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+# irssi, http://irssi.org
+
+## Installation
+
+See `INSTALL` file.
+
+## Files
+
+ - The `docs/` directory contains several documents:
+    - `startup-HOWTO.txt` - new users should read this
+    - `manual.txt` - manual I started writing but didn't get it very far :)
+    - `perl.txt` - Perl scripting help
+    - `formats.txt` - How to use colors, etc. with irssi
+    - `faq.txt` - Frequently Asked Questions
+    - `special_vars.txt` - some predefined $variables you can use with irssi
+
+
+## About
+
+Irssi is a modular IRC client that currently has only text mode user
+interface, but 80-90% of the code isn't text mode specific, so other
+UIs could be created pretty easily. Also, Irssi isn't really even IRC
+specific anymore, there's already a working SILC (http://www.silcnet.org)
+module available. Support for other protocols like ICQ could be created
+some day too.
+
+## Features
+
+So what's so great about Irssi? Here's a list of some features I can
+think of currently:
+
+ - **Optional automation** - There's lots of things Irssi does for you
+   automatically that some people like and others just hate. Things like:
+   nick completion, creating new window for newly joined channel, creating
+   queries when msgs/notices are received or when you send a msg, closing
+   queries when it's been idle for some time, etc.
+
+ - **Multiserver friendy** - I think Irssi has clearly the best support
+   for handling multiple server connections. You can have as many as you
+   want in as many ircnets as you want. Having several connections in one
+   server works too, for example when you hit the (ircnet's) 10
+   channels/connection limit you can just create another connection and
+   you hardly notice it. If connection to server is lost, Irssi tries to
+   connect back until it's successful. Also channels you were joined
+   before disconnection are restored, even if they're "temporarily
+   unavailable" because of netsplits, Irssi keeps rejoining back to them.
+   Also worth noticing - there's not that stupid "server is bound to this
+   window, if this window gets closed the connection closes" thing that
+   ircII based clients have.
+
+ - **Channel automation** - You can specify what channels to join to
+   immediately after connected to some server or IRC network. After joined
+   to channel, Irssi can automatically request ops for you (or do
+   anything, actually) from channel's bots.
+
+ - **Window content saving** - Say /LAYOUT SAVE when you've put all the
+   channels and queries to their correct place, and after restarting
+   Irssi, the channels will be joined back into windows where they were
+   saved.
+
+ - **Tab completing anything** - You can complete lots of things with tab:
+   nicks, commands, command -options, file names, settings, text format
+   names, channels and server names. There's also an excellent /msg
+   completion that works transparently with multiple IRC networks.
+   Completing channel nicks is also pretty intelligent, it first goes
+   through the people who have talked to you recently, then the people who
+   have talked to anyone recently and only then it fallbacks to rest of
+   the nicks. You can also complete a set of words you've specified, for
+   example homepage<tab> changes it to your actual home page URL.
+
+ - **Excellent logging** - You can log any way you want and as easily or
+   hard as you want. With autologging Irssi logs everything to specified
+   directory, one file per channel/nick. ircII style /WINDOW LOG ON is
+   also supported. There's also the "hard way" of logging - /LOG command
+   which lets you specify exactly what you wish to log and where. Log
+   rotating is supported with all the different logging methods, you can
+   specify how often you want it to rotate and what kind of time stamp to
+   use.
+
+ - **Excellent ignoring** - You can most probably ignore anything any way
+   you want. Nick masks, words, regular expressions. You can add
+   exceptions to ignores. You can ignore other people's replies in
+   channels to nicks you have ignored. You can also specify that the
+   specific ignores work only in specific channel(s).
+
+ - **Lastlog and scrollback handling** - /LASTLOG command has some new
+   features: -new option checks only lines that came since you last did
+   /LASTLOG command, -away option checks new lines since you last went
+   away. Regular expression matches work also, of course. Going to some
+   wanted place at scrollback has always been hard with non-GUI clients. A
+   search command that jumps around in scrollback in GUI-style is still
+   missing from Irssi, but there's something that's almost as good as it.
+   /LASTLOG always shows timestamps when the line was printed, even if you
+   didn't have timestamps on. Now doing /SB GOTO <timestamp> jumps
+   directly to the position in scrollback you wanted. Great feature when
+   you want to browse a bit of the discussion what happened when someone
+   said your name (as seen in awaylog) or topic was changed (/last
+   -topics)
+
+
+## Bugs / Suggestions
+
+See `TODO` file and http://bugs.irssi.org if it is already listed in there;
+if not open a bugreport on http://bugs.irssi.org or [send a mail to
+staff@irssi.org](mailto:staff@irssi.org)
+
+You can also contact the Irssi developers on #irssi @ EFnet, Freenode, IRCnet,
+Quakenet and Undernet.
+
+The IRCnet channel is for development related questions and discussions.