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Comment by SlowBro | Hacker News Reader

What’s the nicest looking IRC client these days?

I lately only ever use any chat client sporadically so I’m out of touch, but may be needing a platform soon.

Interesting note: I worked at AOL when AIM was introduced and was one of the first users :-P When I moved to tech support of a local cable internet company that was our official work chat :-)

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As someone who's been on irc since the mid 90s and have had and still do have a couple of Irssis running in screens for 10+ years, I have to say that irccloud is pretty great for ease of use. There was an open source clone called ircanywhere, but it seems abandoned.

I have no idea what the future holds, and I always welcome new tools and disruptions, and I'm using slack, discord, messenger etc for various communities. What keeps me from leaving irc is:

* friction in moving all users that have been using an IRC channel for 20 years

* stupid stuff in slack and messenger like lock in and slow search. I really like grep:ing logs for links and discussions and then reading the context up and down, which I have found difficult in web services.

If you're looking for an open source alternative to IRCCloud, then The Lounge[1] pretty much fills that niche.

[1] https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

Disclaimer: I personally do not need emoji's.

Does TheLounge let users upload custom emoji? I ask, because my coworkers say, "You can take Slack from my cold dead hands". There was even a great emoji war.

I would like to stand up a web interface to IRC and let folks play around on it. I tried Convos, but it didn't seem to fit that piece of the puzzle.

For the backend, I have always used UnrealIRCD + Anope services. It has always been rock solid and scales beyond any need I could imagine. It would be great if there were a modern web interface I could put in front of it that people would want to use.

No, it does not support that. Just uses unicode emojis and lets the OS/browser handle the rendering

Thanks. I totally understand and agree. The problem I am faced with is that Slack (a former gaming company) has gotten people hooked / trained / conditioned on the custom emoji.

No, it doesn't support custom emojis. Even if it did, only this particular client would display them and not any other IRC client.

Thankyou. That would probably be ok, since Slack using the IRC gateway had the same effect.

+1 to The Lounge. It's how I was able to get a few friends & coworkers to start using IRC.

Are you using The Lounge for work? Would you mind sharing which company? It would help me find out if/what companies are (disclaimer: I'm one of the dev). Thanks!

haha this client name reminds me of the old mIRC Channel List days!

Yeah, irssi is running perfectly fine for last 20 years, icq, msn, Skype, discord, everything comes and goes, longins/password got forgotten and lost.

But there is always that irc channel easily to get into and will be there in 20 years.

I know that I can extend my irssi client with plugins needed to preserve history, flag stuff, save in database by triggers, then export that in whatever way I want and serve to the users.

I just wish irssi supported other scripting languages. I don't particularly dislike Perl and it's not like it needs to do very complex stuff, but it'd be fun to tinker with it with my language of choice.

Use the irssi proxy and connect any scripting language or bot framework you like (that supports IRC of course)

I used to do this anyway so that I could reload the bot without reconnect spam

I hate grepping my IRC logs. I wish ZNC had a plug-in that allowed searching logs.

ZNC has the shell plugin, which I use for grepping logs. It's still grepping logs but I can do it from my IRC client.

That’s literally the first actual use of the shell functionality that makes sense!

Here are a couple I just found. I've not tried either but hope to later today.

1) https://github.com/pR0Ps/znc-logsearch

2) https://github.com/robinsmidsrod/znc-log-viewer/blob/master/...

I'm using Louge [0] It's a web application with nodejs stuff.

[0] https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

You might want to take a look at https://www.irccloud.com.

The best apps tend to be platform dependent. I know many who like http://colloquy.info for mac, for example.

I'm fairly impressed with Quassel:

https://quassel-irc.org/

Especially when used in the core/client split version, which allows you to use the webclient https://github.com/magne4000/quassel-webserver/, the irssi-client https://github.com/phhusson/quassel-irssi, the iOS client https://woboq.com/iquassel.html, the Android client https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iskrembile... or https://f-droid.org/packages/com.iskrembilen.quasseldroid/, the new alpha of the new android client https://quasseldroid.info/, and the fulltext search https://github.com/justjanne/quassel-rest-search (with demo here: http://s3.kuschku.de/public/quassel-rest-search.mp4 )

Quassel alone is a kinda nice client, with the entire ecosystem around it, it becomes amazingly powerful.

And the beauty of the Qt client is that, being Qt, you can fully style it with css - e.g. https://bugs.quassel-irc.org/projects/quassel-irc/wiki/Style...

Disclaimer: I contribute to some of the above mentioned projects)

That is so incredible! I've never split it up, I just use the "all-in-one" package usually. Might take the time to deploy the detached server on DO sometime.

For me: WeeChat (running in a screen/tmux) + Glowing Bear (webinterface WeeChat frontend).

WeeChat + screen is awesome. I was using it for Slack. It handled their strange use of +v/-v for user is away at least, better than Epic

I've never tried Glowing Bear. Maybe that would be a nice way for friends to get comfortable with IRC?

You still can, with Wee- Slack (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack) that's what I use now.

Oh sorry, I just meant a way to get friends comfortable with IRC by having a simple doc that says how to use Glowing Bear in front of a simple weechat config so that they could easily move to IRC vs. slack. i.e. even using freenode with a modern web interface. I've seen the wee-chat-slack plugin, but it feels wrong using a normal IRC client to a heavy web stack.

If you have a Mac, Textual is a great IRC client although their upgrade policy is a bit frustrating, in that upgrades don't seem to be free for life, only discounted.

'Great' is relative. Textual (and Colloquy) are tolerable at best.

For Mac, Colloquy is quite good: http://colloquy.info

Works well, and is a native app that fits well into the general ecosystem.

I think Textual looks cleaner and is more functional than Textual - probably because the Textual team picks and chooses what Mac app design cues to use.

Was the second instance of "textual" (out of the 3) meant to say something else?

Ha - good catch. Colloquy not Textual. I was on the John.

IRCCloud and their night theme + their Android + iOS app.

I prefer Limechat for macOS. It’s plain and simple but not terminal based or archaic looking. At least to me anyway. And it has themes.

When I was a wild-haired youth, mIRC was my client of choice, but these days I much prefer KVIrc.

I use Limechat on OSX and Hexchat on Windows and am mildly dissatisfied with both.

I already commented on this, but have you tried Colloquy for Mac?

http://colloquy.info

bitchx

irssi, it really enhances the experience when you can brag about your e-peen

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