March 19, 2004

IRC Clients

My search for a good IRC client will never end, apparently. They all suck, to varying degrees and in different areas. It's not limited to any particular OS either, they are all crap.

• mIRC - decent interface, horrible custom scripting language.
• XiRCON - abandonded, uses TCL for scripting. Of all the non-mIRC clients, this one probably was the most promising. Oh well.
• Klient - bloated, ugly interface, uses some Windows VB thing for scripting (although it can use other languages - a bonus).
• Bersirc - Buggy, I think it uses Pascal (or Delphi) for scripting. Supposedly plans for adding support for more languages, and it recently became free or opensource or something. I'll wait until the next version is out before I bitch about this one more.
• HydraIRC - I'm sure I didn't like this one for some reason, can't remember what. Probably a UI issue.
• Pirch - I remember hating this one years ago. Can't seem to find any official URL for it now.
• XChat - hate it in Linux, hate it in Windows. Stupid GTK+. This is probably among the better IRC clients, which doesn't say much.

Makes me sad that we were working on our own Perl scripted IRC client for over a year, and it ended up not going anywhere. The script had most of the main bits, but the client never got good enough. Before it was abandoned as well. I don't have any hopes of ever finding a good IRC client.