For IRC, I like to use Irssi on a server that I can always keep running and log into no matter what machine I am on. One of the initial challenges with doing this was getting notifications on mentions. I solved this by following the tutorial on Irssi, screen, fnotify and Growl on OSX. The only difference between his setup and mine is that my bash script to do the notifying is simpler. I’ve pasted it below for you to use.

[bash]
#!/bin/sh

ssh harpua "tail -f .irssi/fnotify " | while read heading message; do growlnotify -t "${heading}" -m "${message}"; done
[/bash]

How do you solve the problem of IRC notifications from a remote machine?

In case you are wondering, all of my machines are aliased to Phish songs, hence Harpua.

EDIT: I’ve added the -s flag to growlnotify so that the updates are sticky and thus I see them when I get back to my machine if I’ve stepped away and I don’t leave people hanging.