The Full Stack Leader

IRC in 2026: hello, Halloy

Yes, we’re still using IRC in 2026, haha. Sometimes you can’t rely on Slack or email for mission-critical work, including technical alerts and logs.

This month I moved my IRC usage from LimeChat to Halloy.

A good time to look around because the best macOS IRC apps like LimeChat, Colloquy, or Textual are either sunset or haven’t had recent updates.

Why Halloy

Open source: GPL-3.0, on GitHub, with regular releases.
Plain-text config: one file for settings and one per theme, easy to keep in version control.
Easy to tweak: most changes apply with a config reload. Font changes need an app restart.

Halloy IRC client in a dark Solarized theme, showing a #wordpress chat on Libera.Chat — Mockup of Halloy with the Solarized Dark theme

Tips

Pin your highlights. Halloy’s window system allows many split-pane options; I load key highlights into a 100% wide pane with other channels below in 50% splits.

Make bot colors readable. Several of the 16 standard IRC colors nearly vanish on a Solarized background. A theme’s [formatting] table overrides them.

Hide old connect and disconnect lines. Set success.smart and error.smart to 300 under [buffer.internal_messages], and anything older than five minutes disappears. The reduce noise guide covers joins, parts, and quits too.

Pick a readable font that Halloy can load. A monospaced font that isn’t variable-weight works best. I’m using Menlo, since it ships with macOS and matches my other apps.

See my config

My config using Solarized dark and light themes with more tips & tricks is on GitHub under lancewillett/halloy-irc. The color fixes come from my LimeChat theme, Colloquial-Lance.

AUTHOR & TAGS

Lance Willett

halloy, irc

4 responses to “IRC in 2026: hello, Halloy”

Lance Willett

September 15, 2026

Side note: I’m a happy Halloy user now, but I guess I won’t be contributing much to their open source code. My first bug fix was rejected today since I used AI tools to craft the issue and pull request, including a failing unit test.

Welcome to 2026—wake up, people! A super rough first-timer experience, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. There are nuggets of goodness in all feedback and in all contributions.

Lesson learned. And yet, I won’t be replicating this type of unwelcome approaching in my own projects, including WordPress.org. AI is a super-important tool and I’ll continue to encourage its use.

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Trac MCP – The Full Stack Leader

September 24, 2026

[…] like IRC, we’re still using Trac and Subversion. Sometimes the sure and steady tools wins the […]

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Daniel

October 8, 2026

Small correction from someone with a vested interest: Textual is the one of the three that’s no longer sunset. Michael Morris handed it over to us at Blendbyte last month and the transfer finished last week. Textual 7 keeps working and keeps being sold, Textual 8 is in progress on the same codebase, still native, still BSD, still #textual on Libera. Write-up here:

https://www.textualapp.com/news/a-new-chapter

Nothing against Halloy, by the way. Plain-text config in version control is a perfectly good reason to pick a client, and more maintained IRC clients on the Mac is good news for everyone who still thinks IRC isn’t dead. We’re just making sure the one with sixteen years of users doesn’t become the next LimeChat.

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1. Lance Willett
  
  October 8, 2026
  
  Thank you for clarifying that Textual is still alive and well, Daniel. Yay! Good news for the many folks at Automattic and in WordPress.org who still use and love that IRC client.
  
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