I don’t recall when or where I learned about hftirc. I usually try to make a note of the tipster who sends in a title, so it’s possible I found this one on my own.
hftirc is, as you might have inferred by the name (or by the title of this post) a small-scale IRC client for text-based environments.
hftirc has a lot of small features that I like. I can see that it’s written in C (yes, I wrote that on purpose), and ps_mem.py says it will run on about 1.25Mb of memory. It has a traditional left-to-right arrangement, with the user list as a panel on the right. It seems to follow the traditional slash-command approach to IRC navigation, making it easy to adopt if you’re coming from one of the other big names in IRC.
The configuration file gives you a few more points to consider. hftirc works with color themes, and while the default is a little taxing, a few of them — especially the “white” theme — worked quite nice in terminals with white backgrounds.
You also have the ability to colorize individual nicknames, and to set a default channel that hftirc will jump straight into, as soon as it starts and connects.
hftirc doesn’t show any newer edits than three years ago, and I know some people consider that a sign of staleness and a good reason to avoid a program. I saw no reason to discount hftirc on those grounds; in any case, I doubt IRC is such an innovative technology that three years without maintenance is going to obsolete any working IRC client. 😐
As luck would have it, I can see now how and why I found hftirc: The author is also responsible for tty-clock, one of my favorite programs of the past decade. This just goes to show you, take the time to examine a whole portfolio. 🙂
Inconsolation 