As an IRC client, I run weechat on my server, inside a tmux session, and connect to that using SSH. I had disabled the beep plugin, since I was begining to go crazy every time someone mentioned me. Still, I needed some way to get notified when someone mentioned or /query'ed me. Enter notify-send and twmnd. notify-send is a standard tool to send notifications to the notification server in a linux desktop. twmnd is a nice notification server that blends well with i3 and is not annoying. The first obvious step is to start running twmnd, then.
Now, how do you tell weechat to send your desktop a notify-send over ssh every time someone says your name? You write a plugin. Here's mine: pastebin. Actually, as you'll see, I didn't write all of that. I took a script named lnotify.py from the the weechat website, and modified it to my needs. If you want to use it, you'll have to replace “altair” on line 104 with whatever hostname or IP address your desktop has.