Generally I tend to spend quite a bit of time on IRC in help channels relevant to programming. I have the luxury of working from home so I do not always have other colleagues around so I can ask them questions, etc. Having a good IRC client that is friendly on the eyes is something that is a must for me. Prior to migrating to the Mac platform I used a few IRC clients. The most well knows is mIRC however I did not spend much time on that client because it had it’s own scripting language. I figured there was no point in learning another language only for scripting mIRC. I eventually found Klient and fell in love with it. It was geared more towards the developer. It allowed scripting but also allowed you to create plug-ins using various languages.
with the migration over to the Mac it has taken a while to find a nice IRC client. I have been stuck using Xchat Aqua which is nice but lacks a lot of features for developers, it also lacked quite a bit on how many scripts were out there for you to use. Today another IRC user drudge recommended that I try Linkinus. I had never heard of this IRC client before so I decided to give it a shot. The first thing I noticed was that it is interfaced with Growl which is a very nice notification system. You can set it to notify you when a pre-set highlight word is said in any channel, or when you receive a private message.
