After years of working with an IRC client inside screen on my server to which I connect using SSH, I was missing having any kind of notifications when I'm being highlighted. I don't want to use bouncers or to disconnect/reconnect all the time. So I prefer to make a ssh tunnel from an IRSSI script to a python script I run on localhost, that sends every configured highlight to localhost. That other script calls libnotify on linux or growl on OSX to display the notification.

Source code available at : http://github.com/guyzmo/irssi-over-ssh-notifications

Contributions are opened to package and make it better.

There's a bug I still can't get rid of : when notifications are sent through the tunnel, SSH reports almost all the time :

setsockopt TCP_NODELAY: Invalid argument

if anyone has an idea on how to resolve that, drop me a mail !