There seems to be a lack of information out there on IRC clients for Mac OS X. On Windows, my choice is pretty clear; I use mIRC with NoNameScript, and for running an fserve bot, the script of choice is SysReset.

So, briefly, what’s usable (and totally free!) on a Mac these days?

Colloquy

Colloquy was the IRC client I started using when I first got my MacBook. Importantly, it makes every attempt to conform to the Mac Human Interface Guidelines. It seems decent, but to an mIRC user like me the interface can actually end up slightly frustrating. A possibly more major problem I had was that it would randomly run up the CPU usage really high once in a while, causing the CPU fan to turn on. I’d then have to close the program and start it up again. I’m not sure if it’s been fixed by now, but I’m sure they’ve made some progress overall since then, at least. In any case, Colloquy has a few problems, but it’s certainly usable; I just don’t prefer it.

X-Chat Aqua

Until yesterday, for about a year, I used X-Chat Aqua. In terms of configurability, X-Chat Aqua is pretty good. It has rather extensive options, just as an mIRC user (or an X-Chat user…) would expect to have, and, similarly, the interface is okay but definitely could be better. It’s not out of Alpha yet (and development seems to have stalled a bit) but still seems stable enough.

However, there are some problems with it common to other ports from Windows/Linux (e.g. MS Office); assigning a Space to it in Spaces preferences does nothing. But I would still say that, overall, X-Chat Aqua really isn’t bad. (X-Chat Aqua may be comparable to an older and shareware—but still maintained—Mac IRC client called Snak. I also tried it and don’t think Snak is really worth the bother since X-Chat Aqua does pretty much a similar job.)

LimeChat

I’m glad I found LimeChat the other day. Relatively new and under development, it has some of the mIRC familiarity just as in X-Chat Aqua but with an arguably better interface and easier setup. It’s functional, yet certainly lightweight, and it doesn’t look bad, as far as IRC clients go, at all. I’ve yet to run into any real problems with it, except I almost just kept using X-Chat Aqua until I found the LimeChat keyboard shortcuts to switch between channels easily (cmd + up/down). They definitely should have shown how to do that in the program itself instead of just on the website/documentation.

Anyway, I’d really currently recommend LimeChat for any OS X IRC user. If I find any problems, I’ll update this, and if anyone has further comments, please do make them!