IRC! Who uses IRC today?
At the dawn of time, during the early days of the Internet, those of us who are old enough to have been there used to spend a lot of time on IRC. In the multiple-IM (Instant Messenger) world of today, IRC might seem a little pass but boy did we enjoy hooking up with people from all over the world those days :p Of course, it’s not that IRC is still not used but most people just don’t know of IRC (or prefer not to use IRC) any longer. Recently, a web community that I spend a lot of time at was taken down and all the members of the community found themselves at a loss as to where to hang out. So somebody suggested an IRC chat room and everybody was given a URL to access the chat room via a java applet. Me being the old-time IRC user that I am, I decided that I needed to find a good IRC client instead of the crappy java applet and so my quest was born to find the perfect IRC client :)
In the old days, everybody used mIRC. But the mIRC interface still looks like it did in the Windows 3.1 days and so looks a bit dated now :p I then thought of my favourite IRC client from way back when, pIRCH. But it looks as if they never continued development on pIRCH and it still looks the same as it did ten years ago. I needed something new, fresh, something which had all the features that I wanted but also looked good. So I decided to make a list of features that I wanted.
When I originally used IRC, I wanted a lot of features I wanted the client to be able to connect to multiple servers, it should log channel conversations and it should support aliases. “Aliases? What are those?” I hear you ask. Well, when you use an IRC client you have to employ certain commands to carry out tasks. For instance, to join a chat room, you’d type “/join #chatroom”. Now the thing is people generally (and me specifically) are lazy :p So instead of typing /join for instance, they like to shorten it to /j and that was where aliases came in. Aliases allow you to define a new command (or combination of commands) which could be executed via a user-defined keyword. And that was one nifty feature to have in the old day.
Of course, that was all that I wanted those days. But today, you have other nifty concepts. TAB completion of nicknames, auto-start channels, highlighting of specific words/phrases so that you’ll be notified when somebody mentions something you’re interested in (or says your name). All these are things that you (or at least I) need in an IRC client today. And of course, it helps if the client is free and looks good too.
There is a long list of IRC clients available on wikipedia which should allow you to find your own personal favourite. Me, I opted for HydraIRC after checking out several other offerings. There were a few others that I really liked but they each lacked one or other of the essential features from the list above or they had quirks which made them not quite useable. For example, one of the clients I tried (I forget which one) pops open a private message window each time somebody tried to use a sound-effect for instance. I do understand the reason why the private message opens (because the sound effects are sent using CTCP) but it is really annoying for anybody else who is in the same chat room with you.
But that’s neither here nor, there. If you are an old-time IRC user and have a hankering to get back there, or you’re an IRC newbie trying to pick the best tool to use, the above list might help you make a decision as to the software you want to use. Or maybe this comparison chart will help :)
Related posts:
Who uses IRC? I do. Its still pretty popular.
mIRC = Shit. For me.
when it comes to text message communication between community the internet relay chat is best choice. i tried to use other IM softrware, but found it annoying, with blink and whistles. So i find myself pretty comfortable with Miranda-IM. It can connect to all popular IM programs (Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, Icq, Aol and my favourite IRC). So i think when it comes to multiple networks, miranda is the best solution, otherwise, i prefer use my good old mirc.