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][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