Pidgin works well for me. So far it looks like I’m the only one using it here, so yay pidgin!

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For console, irssi by far. (weechat manages to use more memory than some gui clients on my system, and it just feels bloaty to use, even sluggish at times - ymmv depending on plugins used and support for what scripting languages you compile in). Honorable mention to the OG BitchX client and of course ircii ;)

If you are in a LOT of channels on many different networks, irssi can be a bit of a pain to manage, but it’s made better by running it with AWL (Advanced Window List) inside a tmux session (tmux is optional, but if you don’t use tmux, it will spawn an extra X window instead, it seems it’s not compatible with GNU screen alas).

Beyond that, Quassel is quite nice; it has a server and client component. This means you can throw the server up on any 'old machine (an actual server or an rpi in the attic somewhere), and as you connect with your client(s) you will retain chat history, and stay connected to IRC. There’s actually multiple clients for quassel - you have the official GUI client for desktop, which is quite nice, and does a really good job visualizing which channels are on which network if you configure it to do so. There also is an official android client (which imho is THE best mobile irc client i’ve ever seen so far - unfortunately all the IOS clients I’ve seen are garbage). Multiple clients can be connected to the same quassel server at the same time, so that means you can switch between desktop/mobile and just resume a conversation seamlessly. That’s kind of a big deal, if you can’t be bothered to set up a bouncer like ZNC. (I actually use it in combination with znc, heh) - there also is an irssi module to allow irssi to talk to a quassel server as well, if you still want to use irssi - My only complaint with their GUI client is that it doesn’t seem to support DCC transfers, which is really unfortunate (it also doesn’t seem to support CTCP)

Other than that, I’ve also always been quite fond of kvirc - it has a lot of features, and is very customizable for a gui client - and even has scripting support - closest thing resembling MIRC that you will find on non-windows platforms imho.

I’ve bounced back and forth between Irssi and WeeChat over the years, but I’ve settled on Irssi.

Yeah, I use weechat.

But in the interest of sharing something new: I do also like ii, which is a minimal filesystem-based IRC client. To tail a channel’s messages, for example, you could do

tail -f #vim/out

Then to send a message,

echo 'Hello, world!' > #vim/in

Fun for the first five minutes just pulling together a makeshift IRC client with tmux panes and the above, but then you realize the depth of the iceberg with its scriptability with standard Unix pipelines. Tail out into a perl script that pipes back into in for example and you have a bot.

MIRC

As you say, I use Weechat.

I’m using irssi as well (would a thread about irssi plugins be worth?). Before that, epic5

irssi on computer. LimeChat on iPhone.

irssi is the only one I use

I’m using Weechat out of habit these days but had previously spent a while using IRCCloud for simplicity and the great mobile app.

Irssi was another client I used for a long time, and its Perl scripting capabilities helped me get my first real programming job, so I’ve got a soft spot for it.

epic5 + hienoa

I used to use Weechat in a screen instance on my home server to keep persistence but I moved to Convos.chat and it’s pretty nice. The client runs on your server, you interact with that via your browser. The webapp has some nice features like the ability to host files for sharing with other users, inline link previews and searches.

catgirl it’s a very obscure terminal one but it has all the features I need, though I sometimes switch to the classic irssi, I used to use thelounge for a little bit but web based chat applications aren’t my thing.

Element, the Matrix client.