A work-in-progress fork of HexChat modernized around GTK4 with expanded IRCv3 support. This is not release-ready — expect bugs, rough edges, and the occasional crash. If you want a stable IRC client today, use upstream HexChat.

Upstream HexChat documentation still applies for most basics (FAQ, Python API, Perl API).

• GTK4 port (replacing the GTK+ frontend), with an overhauled xtext renderer (mark-based scroll anchoring, display-line cache), unified main-GUI margins, magnetic pane detents, and progressive column/tree collapse when space is tight.
• Tray icon rewritten on top of LizardByte/tray, replacing the old bespoke tray code. Currently wired up on Windows only; the library itself is cross-platform, so Linux/macOS backends can be enabled without swapping out the integration.
• SQLite-backed scrollback with a zstd-compressed VFS, replacing the old flat text-file scrollback. Also stores reaction and reply metadata alongside messages for IRCv3 draft features.
• IRCv3 3.1/3.2 core: multi-prefix, away-notify, account-notify, extended-join, server-time, userhost-in-names, cap-notify, chghost, setname, invite-notify, account-tag.
• IRCv3 message framework: message-tags, batch, echo-message, labeled-response.
• SASL: PLAIN, EXTERNAL, SCRAM-SHA-1/256/512, OAUTHBEARER.
• IRCv3 drafts (wired up, some with caveats — see below): chathistory, multiline, event-playback, read-marker, message-redaction, metadata-2, channel-rename, pre-away, account-registration, extended-isupport.

• Persistence features (chathistory / read-marker / metadata-2) don't yet surface auth-required failures gracefully — on servers that require login for history, requests just silently fail.
• Intermittent crashes: opening the quit dialog; closing the find bar.
• Pane collapse can clip on fast drags.
• Chanview tree dotted-line indentation is currently broken.
• Display lists in compact mode/Chanview smaller text is incomplete.
• macOS integration is designed but not yet implemented.

Open win32/hexchat.sln in Visual Studio 2022. Build dependencies come from gvsbuild built for GTK4, plus a separately installed OpenSSL. Optional: libwebsockets, jansson, libcurl for OAuth2.

win32/hexchat.props contains environment-specific paths and is not committed.

meson setup builddir
meson compile -C builddir

Debian-family dependencies:

sudo apt install build-essential meson ninja-build gettext libgtk-4-dev libssl-dev \
  libdbus-glib-1-dev libcanberra-dev libnotify-dev liblua5.4-dev libpython3-dev \
  libperl-dev libx11-dev python3-cffi libluajit-5.1-dev libpci-dev python3-dev \
  desktop-file-utils libsqlite3-dev libjansson-dev libsoup-3.0-dev libwebsockets-dev \
  libsecret-1-dev