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I know its built on pretty large abstractions, but I think its impressive to get an entire IRC TUI client out of ~1k lines with comments & formatting.
Excited to check this out! Nice work!
Unsolicited feedback, can the IRC screenshots have more contrast (and also not show such a vibrant distracting background).

The combination of those two make it difficult to even see what you’ve made.

"Modern" is the most passive-aggressive adjective in the history of HN.
To be clear, you still can't click, drag, and highlight text for basic operations like quickly and easily copying some text in any Bubbletea/Lipgloss interfaces, right?

Unless that has changed, that dynamic places this behind most other CLI-based IRC clients, including some that are decades old.

tangential question: are there still any IRC servers and (small) channels with cool people? I recently lost a virtual friend I had talked to for over 20 years, all thanks to some random mIRC channel back in the day. he ran the server with a bunch of ppl for so long. so sad. i really miss the times when we could have fun with just plain text.
I haven't been in a while, but tilde.chat used to be pretty good, and it looks like it's still fairly active.
IRC? Heck, there's still FIDOnet echos and usenet groups still active if you know where to look.

Just a lot of ghost towns in between them.

Impressive. Will give it a try.
Would love to see this for matrix!
I don't understand projects like these. Open source is mainly driven by people that want to do something with computers that's not yet possible so they write some code to help them.

However TUI IRC clients already exist in the form of venerable weechat, and all the other examples people already gave in the thread.

So I ask what is the purpose? Learning? Sure I can see that, but why is a project with 5 commits being presented on HN as some kind of innovative application? Trustworthy projects need tenure and they need humility. This has neither.

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Well, you also developed an alternative to go-fed, didn't you? ;) Was it innovative or necessary? Absolutely not. Was it worth it? Absolutely.
Catgirl it's good enough. For TLS-less connections such as Bitlbee, swirc looks fine, but catgirl it's simpler.
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The real tragedy isn't IRC clients, but that IRC missed its chance to become the dominant decentralized protocol before Slack/Teams took over. The core issue wasn't just tooling. IRC's protocol fundamentally lacked what modern teams need: native multimedia support, seamless file sharing, persistent searchable history, and rich formatting. While IRCv3 improved extensibility, it didn't address these feature gaps. It seems that IRC's simplicity was both its strength and fatal weakness. Great for tech communities, but too bare-bones for mainstream adoption. I feel that we traded decentralization for features, and now we're stuck with proprietary silos
> IRC Chat

> Internet Relay Chat Chat