What's Your Favorite IRC Client, and Why?
What's Your Favorite IRC Client, and Why?
62 comments
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You know, I wish I could enjoy IRC - or chatrooms in general. But I just struggle with them. Forums and their ilk, I get. I check in on them and see what's been posted since I last visited, and reply to anything that motivates me to do so. Perhaps I'll even throw a post up myself once in a while.
But with IRC, Matrix, Discord, etc, I just feel like I only ever enter in the middle of an existing conversation. It's fine on very small rooms where it's almost analagous to a forum because there's little enough conversation going on that it remains mostly asynchronous. But larger chatrooms are just a wall of flowing conversation that I struggle to keep up with, or find an entry point.
Anyway - to answer the actual question, I use something called "The Lounge" which I host on my VPS. I like it because it remains online even when I am not, so I can atleast view some of the history of any conversation I do stumble across when I go on IRC. I typically just use the web client that comes with it.
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Is mIRC still a thing? Do people still use it? Gosh I feel old.
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I was gonna say this is my favorite, with IRCn on top. It's been a while since I connected. Is EFNet still around?
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I downloaded it not that long ago and worked great!
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Weechat. Terminal based, flexible scripting system using a handful of languages, still actively developed, and I can make it work the way I want it to work.
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ERC, why leave Emacs?
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irssi. No explanation necessary
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I use Hexchat. It’s a fine GUI a client, simple and reliable. I use a ZNC bouncer so no need to keep a CLI client running 24/7.
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Just to let you know, Hexchat is no longer maintained, unless someone has forked it. Might be worth looking into alternatives.
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Same. Hexchat + znc = peak of software development
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The Lounge. Very convenient to use.
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Already coming up close to 10 years of The Lounge! Really gets the job done nicely as long as you don't hate webapps. By far the least broken option for mobile unless you go IRCCloud.
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I use Quassel hosted on my server.
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senpai
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Is IRC still that popular? I mean it’s all Discord and Matrix etc these days (not saying that’s a good thing, I f’in hate Discord)
What kind of channels are you in if I may ask?
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IRC's not as popular as in its heyday, and while once it was the main choice for multi-playing gaming chat (Quakenet et al), that's largely gone elsewhere, but it's still very good for certain technical channels.
IRC has also proved to be remarkably resistent to commercialisation, mostly due to the users. Even when one of the biggest networks, Freenode, got taken over by a drug addled mentalist Reference who started insisting all all kinds of strange things, the users just upped sticks and created a new network. A bit of fuss, but the important stuff stayed the same and it's continued much as before as a new network, Librenet.
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I am still active in some private irc servers. The communities haven't changed much since the golden era of irc.
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It is. It's obscure enough for the normies to stay away. Which is its main feature
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Irssi. It's extensible and stable, been using it for years.
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I run irssi on a Raspberry Pi. It has everything I need.
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Do I have to self host it to make it work or can I just install it on my machine
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You can install it on any machine. It's just a terminal IRC client. I run it on a small home server with
screenso that it's always on.
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The one I wrote myself. Not because its any better ha ha. Its pretty fun to work on it though.
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Self hosted ‘The Lounge’ is great.
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Yes TheLounge is fantastic but I switched to Convos these days because it's lighter weight and I somehow manage to overrun my disk much less often :)
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Twitch dot tv
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hexchat, also Konversation
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Element, not only is Matrix the future but it handles bridging to irc well
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the future
Only if the future is a privacy and GDPR minefield...
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What makes it more of a minefield than email?
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ircCloud because my self hosted push notifications were failing and it worked right away.
Irssi before I started depending on push notifications though.
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Polaris.
Yes i am old
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I use the web client of libera.chat and I love it because convenience!
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WeeChat! I've been using WeeChat for like 13 years now and I love it. I used to use irssi back in the days and mIRC before irssi existed.. Some bitchX experiments may have happened at some point during the shell boom too.
This remote interface is the biggest selling point to me even today, it's amazing: WeeChat-Android.
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Quassel, self-hosted.
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Convos - self hosted web based client written in Perl of all things, because it's small, simple, does exactly what I want and no more, and avoids my having to faff with client + bouncer which was getting old 10 years ago and feels positively withering now.
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tiny
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For Windows I like 0irc. It's extremely lightweight and portable. For a browser alternative, KiwilIRC works in a pinch.
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Hexchat and pidgin. What to do now when they are not supported on wayland?
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Slack
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Quassel nowadays, because I'm on my phone more often than my laptop. Back when I say at a keyboard more, it was irssi, no contest
62 comments
Irssi all the way
Unfortunately it's practically unusable for my use case, which is talking in CJK channels on non-UTF8 servers (when the channel name also has such characters), because recode support has been broken for 20 years.