A few months ago after configuring irssi with all the IRC channels I wanted, I ran into the problem of being late to a conversation. Every few days I would check my channels only to see people reaching out to me when I wasn’t around. Sometimes I was able to ping someone to talk, other times the person left and never came back.

I had been using the faithful hilightwin.pl plugin to put all my hilights in a separate window I could monitor. I figured that with my limited knowledge of perl I could rig up something to send me an SMS text message instead of writing the hilight line to a different window in irssi where i may not get to it in time.

Using TextBelt’s free API, I was able to call a curl command from inside perl to send the message triggering my hilight to my mobile phone. It isn’t perfect, as there is some garbled text at the front of the message, but I get the message quickly and I can see not only who sends it but also the channel they are in.

I’ve put the code up on GitHub for anyone to use or improve upon. TextBelt’s API is a little limited in how many messages you can receive in a short period of time (as it should be to prevent abuse) and doesn’t support many carriers outside of the USA, so there is definitely room for improvement if another suitable API was found.

Check it out and let me know what you think!