pwinn:

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, but that could be because I’m not sure what it is.

I think my first IRC client for OSX was Colloquy. At some point Adium gained IRC-ability, and so I switched to that, using it for IRC and chat both. Then I switched again, to Textual for IRC and a short while later, iChat for chat.

I really like Textual, but it has a few bugs. Since I, like most people, don’t appreciate what I have (a really nice IRC client) as much as I’m bothered by what I don’t (a perfect IRC client), I’m on the hunt again.

I’ve searched the interwebs for a popular IRC client for OSX, and what I’ve found is that there really doesn’t seem to be a clear leader. Or even multiple clear leaders. Except for maybe Colloquy. Now I don’t remember: why did I abandon Colloquy?

There are other clients, of course, though most of them aren’t in active development. I found LimeChat, which I’ll try. I found Xirc, which hasn’t been updated in more than five years. I found Snak, which seems more recent. X-Chat Aqua is less than a year out of date, which seems promising. Conversation is also on my list to check out. If I want to spend some real money, there’s Linkinus. I live in IRC all day, so while $30 is steepish, it’s not completely unreasonable.

Ultimately, though, Colloquy seems to be the most popular. I wish I could remember why I abandoned it! Perhaps I was just lured in by the idea of combing my IRC and IM windows. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I have tried all of the clients you mentioned with the exception of Linkinus. Hell, I used Snak for the longest time in college at my typesetting job. It was good, for the day. Limechat is buggy as balls. Xirc, which I used on my personal mac in college for a while (until I found Snak), was buggy and a resource hog. It would randomly just close or lose connection. Limechat was decent enough, but I just didn’t like it’s interface. X-Chat Aqua was just balls terrible (though this was some years ago).

When Textual was released, for free, on the app store, I jumped at it. I hail from mIRC on windows back in the late 90’s and Textual reminds me of that, but with all the amenities and niceties I’ve come to expect from the Mac platform. 

Look at this interface:

Here’s why I like Textual

• Servers/Channels to the left of me, Users to the Right: 
• Simple interface without clutter. 
• Perfect logging to plain text
• In-line images and video preview
• Simple and un-obtrustive notification
• Auto-conversation bookmark
• Resource light.
• Growl support

Linkinus looks a lot like Textual, but it has more “features” which really means it has a more cluttered interface.

Look at the notification:

3: Lines spoken

1: Number of times my name has been mentioned

One small ding and one small “jack russel” hop to let me know I was mentioned and a display in growl of what was said so I can decide to respond to it or not.

Textual is, overall, the best irc client I have used… possibly ever.

And this comes from a man who spent his highschool years getting around the DAISY firewall by tunneling into his home computer to screen irssi. 

Use Textual. It is near perfection.