Irssi

irssi is a popular ncurses based IRC client.

When in irssi, two commands to get you started are:

/help

and

/set

and if you see an option in /set you'd like to modify:

/set autolog
[log]
autolog = OFF
/set autolog on
[log]
autolog = ON
/save

I've now set autolog on and saved my changes. You should be able to find these changes in ~/.irssi/config unless the default path for your configuration has changed.