Alternative IRC Clients

[James SilverWolf† 1]

This is a little list I compiled after a bit of digging around, oddly enough it's relatively hard to find IRC clients besides Hexchat and mIRC. As an aside this is not meant to be competition or any such thing for Hexchat, but rather to offer options.

 

So here's the listing (saving the best for last.)

 

• HydraIRC ( http://www.hydrairc.com/ ) There's much fanfare about this, but personally, I found it to not live up to the hype. (lots of listings for options, and lots of "sorry unavailable" screens for said options.) On the plus side, it ran out of the box (no requirement for additional softwares) and, Virustotal.com reports that the install file is Clean. Its also in ongoing development.

 

• Ice Chat ( http://www.icechat.net/site/ ) Upon downloading the install, I found that it required .NET framework 3.5 or higher, which it also would've began installing. Since I'm not into that, I was unable to install it. It still has ongoing development. Good news: virustotal reports the install file is Clean. (others that use it may want to make a comment regarding this client?)

 

• ClicksAndWhistles ( http://clicksandwhistles.com/index.htm ) This one could give mIRC actual competition, it's customization options meet my basic wants, but it is also fairly easy to navigate and supports SSL. It's GUI is pretty clean. Its in ongoing development and has a forum for interaction and requests for features. This is my favorite of these as it ran out of the box, and as I understand, it's also portable (running with the /pocket command). In further Good News, virustotal reports the install file (plus the two other files in the zip, an empty file meant to be a comment, I suppose? and a setup.exe.) is Clean. As an aside, the only problem I had was that the CTCP version info it returned gave OS details (OS name and service pack), something that is better kept private.

 

Also, for those getting into IRC you can find some help over in my other thread: http://christianfurs.net/thread-5493.html

 

*I did not mention leafchat because it requires Java 5 and up, and most folks would consider Java a security risk inof itself.

 

Hope this proves useful, and if anyone has any other mentions I can always add them later.