When I occasionally read IRC logs saved by irssi, I find the lack of colouring rather annoying and find that I can't read them very quickly. I finally got round to writing a syntax highlighting plugin for Vim in order to correct this. The colours could probably do with some improvement, but it's much better than before.

In case anyone else finds this useful, I have attached the plugin to this post. To use it, save irssilog.vim in ~/.vim/syntax/ and enter the following command to use it with the current file.

:set syntax=irssilog

If you want Vim to automatically detect the file type, add the following to ~/.vim/ftdetect/irssilog.vim¹.

au BufRead,BufNewFile */irclogs*.log    set filetype=irssilog