I put this page together in an effort to compare the multiple IRC clients which are out there for Unix and
derived systems. (Though I can only test those clients on Linux)
Like almost everything on Unix, if there is something for a given
task, there are various solutions, all more or less off a different
approach and addressing different needs. It's almost impossible to
judge those IRC Clients, as it's mostly your personal taste that
matters here.
Thanks to Freshmeat where I got most of
these clients. On the screenshots you can see the window manager i
was using at that time, one of
AfterStep,
AmiWM, or
SCWM.
The following list is what i found on IRC clients out there, and I
don't claim that it's complete. I deliberately excluded two types of
IRC clients here:
BitchX... for many the IRC client of choice (and for many others,
the incarnation of evil). Though you wouldn't guess upon seeing it,
it's really just an extended ircII. It adds ANSI colors and relies
heavily upon those.
Attention, it's preconfigured to do things you might not want to do!
This is a client written in Korn Shell (!), and still is quite
nice. On startup, it even checks whether a new version of itself is
available. Requires a ksh, for example
pdksh
ircbase is a different approach to client design. One part of the
client runs on a host, while the frontend runs on a different
host. That way, you can keep your client online even if you have a
dialup box.
The picture shows irccli, the UNIX ncurses frontend - there are
others.
The client still has some problems (especially the ncurses
frontend), but else seems stable. It is scriptable in JavaScript.
ircII is THE IRC Client in UN*X. It's one of the oldest, and
most-used. It offers a termcap-based console interface, and thanks
to the scripting language, it can be extended at will.
A client written in perl and requires Net::IRC. It excels at making
funny comments out of server messages, in the spirit of NetHack in
which it was written. Additionally, it's quite usable for chatting.
This is another... guess? Right! ircII shoot-off ... Anyways, it
adds ansi-colors, mirc-colors, pipe-colors (whatever that is),
built-in aliases, and remaps some output. It's a matter of personal
taste whether you like it or not, as with most clients.
sic is a termcap based IRC client. It offers no scripting ability,
but some nice features (multiple windows, nonblocking connects and
DNS lookup), but the screen is pretty chaotic. Take a closer look at
the screenshot and you'll see what i mean. It's not very economical
with horizontal screen space.
ScIRC is my own creation, so it's of course the best client out
there (*cough*)
It's a client completely written in Guile Scheme, and can be
extended using this language. Currently it supports the ssfe
frontend from sirc (with a slight modification by myself), thought
I'm going to add a Gtk+ frontend (maybe)
It's still alpha, and i don't do much on it, so don't expect too
much.
Sirc is a client that looks similar to ircII, but is written in Perl
and can be scripted in that language, thus offering one of the best
IRC scripting environments available.
It lacks the windowing functions of ircII, though, so it can get
pretty confusing.
SLirc is a nice SLang library based console client. It has problems
with my version of slang (1.2.1), so i can't test it, and the
screenshot looks a bit depressing.
Tirc is an ircII look-alike, written in C. It emulates the vi
editors interface, and is deliberately missing any true scripting
language since the author despises scripts.
It understands aliases and limited scripting, though.
This IRC client was also available under the name "pirc" ... It
supports ANSI colors for display, a simple scripting interface but
all in all is prone to fail and buggy
fOXIrc is part of the fOXProject, and it uses the xclasses library
that is also used in the fOXProject. It looks neat, but it's
practically unusable if you have configured your window manager to
not decorate transients, since almost all of it's windows are those.
Sula is an X IRC client with a pretty unconventional user interface.
Also very unconventional is the scripting interface: The scripts are
shellscripts that write to stdout what they want to add to the
client etc. Sula uses the xforms library.
Lately, a variation popped up known as "gsula" that adds Guile
scripting (The API isn't very Schemish, though)
JiMM is in pre-alpha, and it's author seems to intent it to b3
r3411y k00l, as this is how most buttons are titled. The DCC support
is broken, but else it seems pretty stable. Most of it's output is
not english, though.
The author of MinIRC says it's a very small client, and that he
intended it to be that way, for example as a browser IRC client for
browsers with the Tcl plug_in.
It doesn't allow the user to be in more than one channel, and
doesn't parse server messages at all - making them quite difficult
to read. All in all a nice client if it has to be *very* small and
graphical, but for nothing else.
NetPlug is a nice, Tcl/Tk based ... uhm, NetPlug. That is, you can
plug it into any net service. One thing you can plug it into is
IRC. It looks nice and stable there, but lacks multiple window
support.
QuIRC is a newer client written in C++ that uses Tk as it's
interface and Tcl for scripting. It uses only one window, and
switches between channels using a point and click interface. I
didn't encounter any major problems nor crashes.
All in all it looks quite OK, though pretty basic.
Zircon is an IRC client that doesn't allow written commands by
default, everything has to be clicked. (That's not a bug, that's a
feature, and can be changed (thanks to Draco^LnX for that info)).
Additionally, it might send unwanted data to IRC which could lead to
misunderstandings.
Hmm... this client is *very* alpha. It uses only one window, so it
can get pretty confusing.
Else it seems OK, though pretty pretty beginning for now. I had
quite a few problems compiling that beast (someone tell the author
about #include <errno.h> and proper prototyping, please)
This client is an AmIRC (an Amiga IRC client) look-alike (that's why
i did the screenshot on AmiWM, the Amiga-style window manager) ...
OK, this client is a bit beta but it's a really nice start.
Being the former XmIRC, it's still not similar to mIRC for
Windows[tm] (and i guess that's why the name changed). The client
looks like a nice start, but it's still very beta, and doesn't
compile well with gtk-1.1
A nice client, and scriptable in perl, thus almost as versatile as
sirc. It can drag channel windows in the main window, and let them
loose again, so it's very neat to use, though it still has some
bugs. It's officially dead and replaced by irssi
The successor of eIRC, with the interface library switched from
Motif to Qt. I couldn't test it, though, it coredumped upon
connecting to my IRC server.
A very, very nice looking IRC client. It slightly resembles mIRC,
but is actually usable. The changes from v0.9.5 (after which the
development almost halted) to v0.9.6pre7-2 are astonishing. It
actually works now, and the look was improved even more.
The windows can be snapped from the main window and placed anywhere,
and also sucked back in. The scripting abilities are simple but
powerful enough for most uses.
kSirc is a KDE/Qt frontend to sirc. It retains the versatile
scripting with perl, and adds a nice user interface. Though it's
still a bit buggy, it is usable for continued chatting.
