For many Linux users looking for a graphical IRC interface, XChat has been the natural client of choice for them, due to widespread inclusion in popular distributions. For those who are prefer the command-line (either because of comfort working in a terminal environment, or they think that doing things in text-mode makes them cool), many will claim that irssi, ircii, bitchx, epic4, or any number of other clients is the best. Now, I’m an XChat fan, personally, but when it comes to text-mode, I think the terminal version of it is ugly as shit, and clunky. irssi works just fine for me.
There is a large part of the IRC community using mIRC and Windows (or maybe they’re all using it with WINE, though that seems unlikely). What makes XChat more desirable than mIRC? Let’s take a look, shall we?
With mIRC, you can write scripts in… mIRC-script. That’s about it. It’s limited, but some people have managed to do some pretty impressive things with it. Of course, if you look at the code for those amazing things, it’s usually harder to read than an awk-line.
Now, with XChat, you’ve got a bit of flexibility. Supporting scripting in… Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, and even DMDScript (aka JavaScript or ECMA-262). Hell, if you want to, you can use C or C++ to write plugins for XChat, including plugins to allow the use of any other language you’d like. That’s where the other plugins came from. Someone wanted support for it, so they added it. Which brings us to a lovely feature of XChat. It is open source, well-documented, and the code is all there for you to play with.
What else do we have…
Some trivial enhancements that improve usability: coloured nicks, and marker lines. Convenient things that make it easy to keep track of who is talking, and remember where you stopped reading. Coloured nicks does exactly as the name implies. It assigns a colour to each person who talks, and when they talk in the future, highlighting their nick in that colour (for those that dislike this, it is optional). The marker line just shows a little red line below the last line printed when the window lost focus. Easy to find your place!
Buttons!
I don’t understand why this feature seems unique to XChat… all you have to do is type /addbutton , allowing you to have quick and easy access to the commands you use most often, and even allowing you to bind your scripts to buttons. Convenient!
I also love the away tracking, and the option to show hostnames next to nicks in the user list box (not recommend on FreeNode, though…).
Portability is also an issue for some. XChat runs on many platforms! Win32, Linux, BSD, and others! mIRC runs on… Win32. Oh, and other things if you fuck around with WINE or something. And even then, it runs really, really slowly.
For me, XChat is just the obvious choice. For casual IRC users, it’s perfect. For serious IRC junkies, script-writers and programmers, it’s perfect. You can use the languages you know, and if you don’t know them, you’re now equipped to learn them.
Why wait? Nothing to lose by trying it! Debian users, apt-get it, if you haven’t already. Gentoo users, there’s an ebuild for it. For those without a decent package manager (*cough* Slackware, RedHat, Slackware *cough*), grab the source and compile it. If you’re using Windows (by choice or circumstance), Vaidrius Petrauskas maintains a very solid build of it for Windows.
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