[ILUG] irc clients

[Declan Moriarty]

On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 08:38 +0100, Ruairi Newman wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I recently noticed that some people seem to be die-hard advocates of certain 
> irc clients; irssi, BitchX and x-chat to name a few.
> 
> I've never really been bothered with scripting and other advanced features of 
> irc clients, but I am curious as to the main differences between the popular 
> Linux-based irc clients.  Could anyone enlighten me?
> 
> I should mention that I'm not trying to start an advocacy war here, but I have 
> used irssi for years because it's convenient to leave running in a remote 
> screen session, and would like a quick idea of what I'm missing (if anything) 
> in other clients.

I have been mainly supervising the network activity of my three
teenagers and thus feel I can comment on their experience. The one to
beat, imho, is mirc under windows. It has very nice features by default:
Log on to, say, 5 channels, and each one minimised where the
conversation is continuing without you changes colour. My boys (two of
them touch typist console jockeys) settled on BitchX after trying
everything under linux, largely because the rest of them were
'crap' (read limited). X-chat they found second best. The rest they
wouldn't go online with.

There's a whole op and bot language out there that can be used off the
command line, but can also be scripted. They had, for instance, a few
commands to reserve a nick, identify as it, and get recognized as it.
It begs for a simple script. This prevented anyone else logging on as
that nick and pretending to be them.

IRC scripting is really for people who want to spend a lot of life doing
irc, or who get excited when their computer does something half useful.