

HexChat originally sprung out of the controversy surrounding the decision of XChat’s primary developer to charge for Windows builds of the software, the source of which is free software covered under GPL.

XChat is easily the most popular of the X11 clients - it’s lightweight, scriptable in multiple languages, and has sensible defaults. If your text editor is also your operating system, it might be a great first choice for you, otherwise, consider sticking with the more mainstream clients. ERC (emacs IRC client)Įveryone’s favorite kitchen sink has a built in IRC client, ERC, which is fully functional, extensible in the Lisp language so fondly loved by emacs users, and sadly, relevant to almost no-one else.

It’s comparable in features to irssi, but, uniquely, also functions as a Jabber client. WeeChat is a relative newcomer to the terminal-oriented client scene, but still compares favorably to the others. ircII and its closest descendant,ĮPIC, are still actively maintained, but maintain faithfulness with the original “blank canvas” of ircII–they are typically highly customized by each user, either by hand, or via a script pack.īitchX and ScrollZ take a different approach: both having started originally as script packs, they eventually applied their modifications directly to the client itself, creating a derivative of ircII with more bells and whistles than any user could possibly need. ircII and derivativesįor years, the standard by which all other clients were measured, ircII and its derivatives remain a solid choice. Irssi has taken ircII’s place as the modern gold standard for IRC clients, with a sensible, familiar interface, sane defaults, a modern featureset, and of course, an embedded perl interpeter as its scripting interface. The original IRC client, which was once distributed in the same package with IRCNet’s IRCD, is now obsolete, but many other clients have improved upon its design.
#Best irc client 2016 portable#
The first clients and servers for IRC were written as portable C code, which could be compiled and run on a variety of Unix derivatives, including many of the systems common in academic research at the time.
