Even in a world with Slack, I still find IRC useful. I use the ZNC bouncer to keep my connections open so that I can catch up on history and also keep two different machines in sync.

The problem I was having with my setup was that the last 50 lines would be replayed to each client regardless of if it already saw it or not. On a lower volume channel this means that my history is the same 5 lines printed over and over, and clearing that out is a manual effort.

So when the Textual 5 release notes said Added support for the 3rd-party ZNC module: Playback I was happy, since that module does everything I need to. But it didn’t work out of the box and I needed some settings.

First configure Textual and ZNC like it shows in the help.

Then, install the playback module. The page has documentation on how to do it, but I found the easiest way was to compile ZNC from source after copying the module in to the modules directory. This also gets me the latest version instead of using the CentOS version.

In the ZNC interface, under “your settings”, make sure that Auto Clear Chan Buffer and Auto clear query buffer are unchecked:

Finally you need to have Textual log IRC conversations so that each client can track the offsets:

Now, each client keeps track of its own position in the logs and there is no duplication!