Irssi is a powerful but sometimes baroque irc client that seems to be the de facto standard nowadays. One of it's downsides is that the default theme, binds and settings are pretty awful.

By default, meta-0..9qwer..io (the number row and the qwerty top row) access the first 20 windows. However for most IRC junkies this won't do, they need some way to access window numbers, say, up to one hundred. Nike has one solution for this but this is what I prefer:

for i in $(seq 0 9); do for j in $(seq 0 9); do
echo "/bind meta-g-$i-$j change_window $i$j"; done; done

This shell snippet generates commands to bind the sequence alt+g x y to window 10x+y. This doesn't intrude on the default binds so I can still access the first 20 windows with just one modified keypress, but still keeps windows up to 100 nicely in reach.

To handle other shortcomings of irssi I recommend nospambot (sadly offline, it seems) for ignoring noisy bouncing, nickserv for authenticating with NickServ, act for removing noise from the activity. I've also designed two themes for irssi: trax (.theme file) (I know it's kinda tacky, I was young and 1337 back then) and simplicity (.theme file) (Works well on both black-on-white and white-on-black terminals).