Personally I used to use Pidgin, but since I moved my XMPP to Gajim because of OMEMO I have no need to stay tied to it necessarily. So I’m looking to expand my horizons, and I figured here’s as good a place as any to start a discussion about Linux IRC clients.
What do y’all use? Terminal, GUI, both?
irssi or hexchat (earlier xchat) since forever. I’m one of the weird people that even paid for xchat on Windows ages ago.
I’ve never liked the clients that were just an extension in something else, like Pidgin.
Circe, because why would you ever want to leave Emacs
+1 but erc
Weechat, it always annoys my Chinese colleagues.
Well, I just switched back to trusty old irssi after quassel became unbearable.
Hexchat (GUI) and weechat (CLI) are good solutions.
I use The Lounge, it’s a self hosted server/bouncer that you use through a web UI. That makes it so I can stay online 24/7, and can access IRC from any device including my phone. It even supports push notifications, so when someone pings me on IRC, I get notified on my phone and can go open up the client and look at my chats. It’s pretty good!
Not as lightweight as a terminal client, but keeping a Firefox tab open for it isn’t that memory hungry. Negligible when you have dozens of tabs open and a few Electron apps anyway.
Seconding this. Among all the web IRC clients I have tried, The Lounge is the best, and the experience on mobile is pretty good.
WeeChat was my go-to, years ago.
Only tried issri on CLI Linux… Hexchat on windows I couldn’t eve get to connect lol. What are people using to keep IRC open, so you can look back on chats? Pretty new to it
ERC
tmux + weechat. Also connect to it via weechat-android on my phone. Great for getting pings and quick replies while not at the desktop.
thelounge self hosted web client
Try HexChat 😉.
For the terminal I use weechat in Tmux and for GUI I use Quassel since it gives me an experience similar to weechat in tmux
Weechat (not to be confused with wechat)… Similar to irssi with more modern features and extension language options.
I’ve been using exclusively ERC for a while now, it works great.
