My guess is that most people use Irssi or Weechat. Would be surprised to hear if anyone uses ircii or mirc, and the only way to find out is to ask.
What’s your favorite client?
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 intoin
for example and you have a bot.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.