Looking for an accessible IRC client for Mac.

By John Moore, 21 March, 2012

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Hi all. Does anyone know of a good and accessible IRC client for the Mac? I am in need of one and have never worked with IRC before. I am also not comfortable with the Terminal. I am testing two out right now, XChat Aqua and Coloqui. XChat works with Lion for people that are wondering. THanks for the help.

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Comments

By Mario Lang on Sunday, March 25, 2012 - 16:25

Hi. I have not tried it on Mac OS X yet, but I can tell that Colloquy works relatively good in iOS, so it might be a good candidate to look at in Mac OS X.

By Nicolai Svendsen on Sunday, March 25, 2012 - 16:25

In reply to by Mario Lang

Coloquy seems to work fine. The interface, anyway. I wasn't able to get the chat console to give me anything useful despite apparently being connected, so I'm not sure if it's just my network acting up as it has been lately. I'm not sure about getting automatically spoken output, however, if you prefer to have that. It doesn't seem to support Growl, at least not Growl 1.3. There's another client called Macirrsi which has always worked very well. Only downside to it is that you'll have to pipe the output through something like Espeak in the Terminal if you want it automatically. I'm still looking for something a lot less technical. Most people might just want something that you set up, enable preferred notification methods and there you go. At any rate, my Coloquy findings weren't very successful, but that doesn't mean it's not gonna work. It may just be me being too quick to draw conclusions, though the interface looked fairly good. Feel free to add to this. :)

there is a multi-protocol client called adium that supports irc and is accessible, I do not know how adium supports this protocol, I was unsatisfied with miranda for windows, but now it's many years I do not use IRC!

 

By Nicolai Svendsen on Sunday, March 25, 2012 - 16:25

In reply to by Elena Brescacin

I did consider including adium's ability to connect to IRC, but I don't find it very satisfactory. haven't been able to see status messages on my end, nor bring up a specific channel list. I haven't been able to do it, at least, and commands which normally take care of such a task display nothing in my window. I tried it just last night to see if anything had changed, and at least for me, it's still not a very friendly experience.

By Devin Prater on Friday, January 25, 2013 - 16:25

From what I've found, Coloquy on the mac doesn't work well with autospeaking messages. Neither could MacIrssi. I will try Adium and see if that works any better.