Miscellaneous Info

clircs was built because after almost 40 years of IRC, I couldn’t find a decent, traditional client that would run in Windows Console without needing to rely on WSL or Cygwin. This has annoyed me to varying degrees over the years, because even as a former mIRC scripter and member of the ircN dev team, I’ve typically preferred console clients like Irssi. Hell, even when I was using ircN, 99% of the stuff I did with it was on the command line, plus I was usually using some sort of BitchX theme.

So I decided to learn C# and build it myself, and quickly figured out why nobody had bothered with this bullshit before. Just doing independent software development in a Windows environment can, by itself, be maddening. That’s also why console-lovers will install a whole-ass Unix environment on their Windows machine just for IRC. It’s better-suited for it.

clircs attempts to bring a taste of old school IRC to Windows, while remaining intuitive, fast, and stable, like a terminal client should be. It also tries to be legitimately useful, with channel and client management functions built-in, so you don’t have to rely on third-party scripts. Or worse, writing scripts yourself, because who’s got time for that shit?

Functionally, clircs behaves like command line ircN. It shares the same eggdrop-style userlist, flood and channel protection settings, and has dozens of convenience commands that share ircN-like syntax, so you can still do things like /mop and /fkb and /massinvite. In total there are over 130 commands and more than 80 different settings to configure. All settable on the command line and viewable in neat little info boxes.

It’s also an ideal client for bouncer connectivity. clircs isn’t exactly designed to be an always-on client that can be thrown into screen or whatever, but it plays quite nicely with most (not all) popular bouncers including Lurker and soju. clircs even supports the IRCv3 server-time message tags so that playback timelines are coherent.

Speaking of IRCv3 capabilities, clircs supports … some of it. Specifically (for you nerds), it supports CAP negotiation, multi-prefix, echo-message, message-tags, server-time, and SASL. Even more specifically, clircs should have no problems with servers and bouncers that support IRCv3 capabilities as long as they follow the spec(s). Otherwise, no promises.

Beyond that, it’s a solid console client that handles all the old school shit gracefully. No, it’s not going to show inline images or the typing notification, but it will hop on an eggdrop partyline via SCHAT over IPv6.

Info

clircs at GitHub
ircN: the old mIRC script clircs is based on

IRC Channel

Visit the #clircs channel on EFnet