IRC clients for the Mac

[giza]

Can anyone recommend IRC clients for OS/X that don't suck? I played around with 1 or 2 awhile ago and wasn't impressed.

The last cool client I used was BitchX for Linux a few years ago, and rather liked it. If only there was a port to OS/X...

Comments

[darthgeek.livejournal.com]

Fire Chat?

[giza.livejournal.com]

I thought Fire was a general purpose IM program?

I used it for IM a few years ago and didn't like it much.

[darthgeek.livejournal.com]

It's sort of like Trillian. It does IM and irc. Doesn't BitchX have some sort of gnome front end?

[giza.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I don't feel like running X all the time.

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

X-chat Aqua.

http://xchataqua.sourceforge.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

It rocks my world. }:)

-Z

[cuprohastes.livejournal.com]

All mac software sucks, and IRC clients doubly so.
Well, AdiumX is pretty good, but I dunno if it does IRC. Probably. It does pretty much everything else.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Nope, it doesn't do IRC. But then again, IRC is more for groups of people chatting and not person-to-person like IM is.

[taral.livejournal.com]

I used to use Colloquy, now I use X-Chat Aqua.

[zannyvix.livejournal.com]

I use Snak for IRC. Works pretty well, though there's a $20 registration if you don't want it to log you out ever 30 mins or so.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Ah, that was the one I tried before, and I didn't like it very much. I recall having had issues of getting into channels. I think it refused to create a chat window until you joined a channel, which I'm not used to for IRC clients. :-/

[zannyvix.livejournal.com]

It also has issues joining one particular network I chat on for some reason. I've about had it with the program, especially since I vaguely remember getting an email saying a certain amount of time had passed and I would need to pay that damn registration fee again... Think I just ignored it. I've not been on IRC in awhile anyway.

[bigtig.livejournal.com]

Call me odd. BitchX is available for OSX. Works fine in a terminal.

[ryvex.livejournal.com]

I use Colloguy. Not great, but it works. I'm gonna try that other one. o.o

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I'm currently using Colloquy on the grounds that it's a universal binary and I have an Intel Mac. It's not a bad program at all, though. The display's a little froo-froo (it's Webkit-based, so it's very reminiscent of Adium) but it can be fiddled with endlessly, and beyond that it's a pretty straightforward program. I don't know how good it is for chat power users, but it seems to be an increasingly popular choice for people who want "the Mac feel" in an fairly full-feature IRC client.

I've also used -- and liked -- MacIrssi, which is basically a Cocoa wrapper around Irssi. It's pretty straightforward and can share config files with the console Irssi, which actually came in handy with one setup I had. It's pretty good for getting as close to a console app as you can without being utterly mouse-ignorant. My only concern about MacIrssi is that it appears to be stalled in development, and given that it took them months to make it Tiger-compatible, that was a minor worry.

You can use console clients, of course -- for instance, DarwinPorts has BitchX and Irssi in it. (If I recall correctly, I tried both before settling on Irssi.)

[susandeer.livejournal.com]

I use Minerva. No, not Mink.

[elfasi.livejournal.com]

I swear by Snak, it works well if you're used to something like mIRC on Windows, but isn't a very Mac-like application. Has changed a lot over the years though, so if it didn't do things in the way you liked, try it again. My boyfriend swears by Conversation, is shiny and Mac like.

[justincheetah.livejournal.com]

I've been pretty darn happy with X-Chat Aqua, especially as it has decent (functional!) support for SSL.