IRC Clients

From Applepedia

Contents 1 X-Chat Aqua 2 Colloquy 3 Conversation 4 irssi 5 BitchX 6 X-Chat X11 7 Snak 8 IRCle

X-Chat Aqua

X-Chat Aqua is an Aqua port of the XChat program.

Pros:

• Fast
• No installer
• Script support (among others, kalleboo's Growl script)

Cons:

• "Only show last x lines" feature broken.
• Often quite out of date from the "real" XChat Project.
• No native option for the dock icon to bounce on message highlight

Colloquy

Colloquy works like Adium as in it renders the chat with WebKit. This means that it looks spiffy, but it's a bit slow. Use the latest nightly as it speeds up the program quite a bit.

Pros:

• Looks nice
• Fully scriptable using Applescript
• Growl-compatible
• Good Mac OS X citizen

Cons:

• Kind of slow
• Doesn't display ASCII art correctly

Conversation

Conversation applies the brushed-metal interface to IRC.

Pros:

• GUI client (good-looking)
• Visual style resembles iChat
• Arguably the fastest of the native IRC clients (much faster than Colloquy)
• Growl-compatible
• Good Mac OS X citizen

Cons:

• Not as flexible as other clients

irssi

irssi is a modular, extremely customizable console IRC client. Easily installed using DarwinPorts or Fink, irssi is simply the best IRC client ever, at least for those who can live without a GUI, However IrssiX is available if you like irssi with a Aqua feel to it. irssi with the proxy module and/or in combination with screen means you can access your IRC from anywhere.

Pros:

• In combination with "screen" and/or the proxy module, you can access it anywhere.
• Scripts, plugins, modules

BitchX

BitchX is an another console IRC client, but it's a bit older than Irssi.

Pros:

• Has built-in "screen" mechanism
• Tons of plugins and scripts available

Cons:

• Since it's older, it's a lot more archaic

X-Chat X11

You can compile xchat with DarwinPorts or Fink. This version of xchat is a tad faster than xchat aqua, but doesn't give you any OS X goodies, such as spell checking.

Pros:

• Fast, good at handling many channels with lots of text
• Script support (among others, kalleboos growl script)

Cons:

• Not a Good MacOS X citizen
• Must be run in X11.app

Snak

Cons:

• Shareware

IRCle

IRCle was the IRC client 'back in the day', and it's the best free choice for MacOS 9 and earlier. It has an OS X version as well, but it hasn't aged well.

Pros:

• AppleScriptable, with many old scripts out there

Cons:

• No tabs
• 5000 palettes