Looking for a powerful and fast IRC client for Linux? Look no further than WeeChat. It’s a feather light chat client whose capabilities can be extended as per your requirements, thanks to the numerous plug-ins and scripts available for it. In fact, WeeChat in itself consists of just the core features, and all of its power comes from the many plug-ins and scripts that it supports, all of which can be loaded/unloaded dynamically to the program in real-time.

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WeeChat’s extensive feature set includes goodies such as full multi-server capabilities, built-in support for 7 scripting languages, incremental text search, dynamic line filtering, robust script manager, and then some more. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. On the customization front, you can tweak colors for nicknames based on status, backgrounds, and stuff like that. Round it off with IPv6, SSL, and proxy support, and WeeChat gets even better.

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Platform Availability: Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Unix, GNU Hard, Mac OS X, and Windows (via Cygwin)

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Price: Free