HexChat is an IRC client based on XChat, but unlike XChat it’s completely free for both Windows and Unix-like systems. Since XChat is open source, it’s perfectly legal. For more info, please read the Shareware background. HexChat was originally called XChat-WDK which in turn was a successor of freakschat.
WeeChat is a fast, light and extensible chat client, with a text-based user interface. WeeChat is: modular: a lightweight core with optional plugins multi-protocols architecture (mainly IRC) multi-platforms: Linux, Unix, BSD, GNU Hurd, Haiku, macOS and Windows (WSL and Cygwin). extensible with C, Python, Perl, Ruby, Lua, Tcl, Scheme, Javascript and PHP fully documented and translated into several languages a free program released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 an active project with a large community for scripts.
