What are the best IRC clients for Linux?
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Pro Free and open source
HexChat is available as a free download with source code licensed under GPL v2 and available on GitHub.
Pro Great interface
HexChat's default interface is clear, well-organized and intuitive. Channels can be laid out as both tabs and in a tree structure. All components such as user lists, topics bar or even menu bar can be hidden to provide a clean way to interact. Conversely the interface can be configured to show...
Pro Actively developed
GitHub repository shows active development.
Con Bad character support
Writing normal apostrophes and certain characters is not possible without a certain plugin installed. Additionally, it does not render all glyphs like most other programs would.
Pro Smart filtering
Smart filtering lets set a series of rules for IRC channels. For example, it allows instructing the client to show /quit and /join messages only if the user was speaking in the last 20 minutes.
Pro Terminal-based
WeeChat has a command line interface.
Pro Highly customizable and configurable
An many dotfiles are publicly available.
Con No official GUI option
While there are some unofficial remote graphical interfaces available for WeeChat, it is intended to be used as a terminal client. As such it might be challenging to use to those accustomed to graphical interfaces.
Con Scripting API allows poorly written scripts to be used as attack vectors
Plugin documentation includes the following warning: In many functions, for speed reasons, WeeChat does not check if your pointer is correct or not. It’s your job to check you’re giving a valid pointer, otherwise you may see a nice crash report ;)
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Con Gives little direction upfront
Actually, Irssi.org has it's own GREAT documentation.
Pro Regularly Maintained
Konversation is still being updated with new features and bug fixes. Konversation 1.5(released January 15, 2014) has added plenty of major features.
Pro Persistent Connection
Quassel can run as a client for a quassel core (server) which maintains permanent connections with IRC servers. This allows you to log into the quassel core and retrieve backlogs and notifications that you missed while away.
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Pro Support for a wide range of additional chat services
Pidgin not only supports IRC, it also supports plenty of other services such as AIM, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ and plenty of others. This way, you can have all of your conversations in the same app and won't have to deal with multiple chat windows being open.
Con No native VoIP support
While there are plugins there is no built in support for VoIP in Pidgin which is time consuming to implement instead of being baked in from the jump.
Pro Everything is a file
ii is a minimalist FIFO and filesystem-based IRC client. It creates an irc directory tree with server, channel and nick name directories. In every directory a FIFO in file and a normal out file is created. The in file is used to communicate with the servers and the out files contain the server mes...
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Pro Highly customizable look
While most clients allow changing the theme or style of a window, XChat gives complete control over what it looks like. It's possible to set a custom image as the background, changing font, or syntax colors.
Con Development stopped
The latest release of XChat was in 2010. An active fork is HexChat.
Pro Great UI
The CSD-based UI is great to look at. No screen space goes entirely wasted and is presented neatly.
Con Some advanced features are lacking
Polari's users will find some advanced features lacking, such as Direct Client-to-Client (DCC).
Pro Single server
Each instance of the client can only connect to one server and then you can join multiple channels with the join command. Example: "irc -s irc.freenode.net", then "j #lua" and "j #chicken"
Con Documentation
Its website and README do not give enough information about shortcuts and commands. You have to look those things up in the source file.
Pro Elegant and minimalist interface
Communi user interface for desktop and mobile is minimal, which helps you focus on the task at hand instead of being distracted by extra UI elements.
Con No DCC
Communi does not support DCC (for a reason)
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