The default location for the main Irssi configuration file is ~/.irssi/config. This can be changed with one of two command-line options:

• --config=FILE_PATH -- specify a particular file anywhere on the filesystem to act as the config. The Irssi working directory remains unchanged, as ~/.irssi.

• --home=DIR_PATH

In general, all operations that can be achieved by editing the config file can also be effected through invoking commands from within Irssi. Doing it that way instead means:

• You don't have to worry about getting the format wrong - the config parser is quite picky about formatting errors, and has very little tolerance for malformed files. It is also unlikely to report the location of any problems, and just silently fail or function incorrectly.
• You have tab-completion for functions, arguments and some argument values to help get things right.

There are (to date) two identified conditions under which editing the config file by hand might be necessary. These are:

1. Accidentally unsetting the cmdchars variable, making it impossible to invoke commands from within the client.
2. Editing of the format-strings for the default status-bar items.

If you encounter one of these problems, consider the following:

• Make a Backup.
• Remember that your client may have uncommitted changes (if autosave is off, or they have changed only recently and you haven't yet called /save.
• Using /save will overwrite the filesystem config with the settings from the running Irssi (the corollary to the above).