In busy channels you might not be interested in all the joining, parting, quitting, and renaming that goes on. You can omit those notices using C-c C-o.
You can control which notices get omitted via the
rcirc-omit-responses variable. Here’s an example of how to
omit away messages:
(setopt rcirc-omit-responses '("JOIN" "PART" "QUIT" "NICK" "AWAY"))
Notice that these messages will not be omitted if the nick in question
has recently been active. After all, you don’t want to continue a
conversation with somebody who just left. That’s why rcirc
checks recent lines in the buffer to figure out if a nick has been
active and only omits a message if the nick has not been active. The
window rcirc considers is controlled by the
rcirc-omit-threshold variable.
Certain messages can be omitted by default, unless the user manual
requests them. For example, if you don’t want to display TOPIC
and NAMES messages, after reconnecting, you can configure
rcirc-omit-unless-requested to hide:
(setopt rcirc-omit-unless-requested '("TOPIC" "NAMES"))
Now NAMES will only be displayed, after it has been requested via the
rcirc-cmd-name command.