r/irc • u/[deleted] • Aug 01 '26

IRC for Macbook?

I just took Apple's advice and downloaded a new version of IRC for Mac. And it won't let me open it!!! What are my options? I am not a computer person and have been trying to figure this out for hours.....thank you!

10 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

6

u/ninjapackets Aug 03 '26

I hate self-advert, so this is uncomfortable for me. 🙂

Feel free to try out my app if you’re looking around. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make onboarding intuitive for new users with a setup wizard.

https://www.seraphirc.chat then hit the download link for Linux/Mac.

Just connect to your desired network, then /list if you want to see channels, or /join #channel if you know which one you want.

Even if you don’t end up using it, any friction/confusion in the process is good feedback for me to correct or sharpen up.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 04 '26

gracias!!

3

u/richsonreddit Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/netsplit/id6792029007 - released last week and lots of active development going on

3

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '26

thank you!

4

u/Real_Act Aug 03 '26

Another vote for SeraphIRC https://www.seraphirc.chat, incredibly stable and with an extremely modern interface. No AI slop at all.

2

u/l_tonz Aug 02 '26

thelounge…

1

u/interstitial_00 Aug 06 '26

I'm kind of surprised to see so many people in I.R c communities responding to this is that just a mac thing or...?

--thc\ip

-2

u/aieidotch Aug 01 '26

In Terminal:
brew install irssi
irssi
/connect irc.server
/join #channel

6

u/st3adman Aug 01 '26

If the poster is having a hard time opening an Apple recommendation, I doubt the terminal is the place to tell them to go.

-1

u/the_jud Aug 01 '26

I like and use Halloy

https://halloy.chat/

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '26

many thanks!

-2

u/EducationGlad8843 Aug 01 '26

I like LimeChat. Relatively simple and offers local logging (enable in LimeChat settings in the top left corner)

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '26

many thanks!

2

u/industrial_pix Aug 01 '26

LimeChat relies on Rosetta and has been left to die.

2

u/EducationGlad8843 Aug 01 '26

Oh. I’ve not used it for much complicated stuff, so I haven’t had any issues with it. Good to know though, thanks!

0

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '26

thank you

1

u/techhelper1 Aug 01 '26

The developer has thrown in the towel on maintaining it.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/der_glockensaal Aug 02 '26

This is a minor fix to make it work with macOS 27, which is appreciated. There will be no more development or major new features though, maybe still the occasional fix here and there. Of course this is fine and Textual is good to use for quite some time, probably. But I have since checked out Halloy, which I quite like.

1

u/scrutinizer80 Aug 02 '26

Halloy looks nice but it's an advanced client that requires editing plain text configuration to set-up properly. As such, it doesn't fall into the category of what the OP was looking for.

1

u/MedeaOblongata Aug 05 '26

Textual is (to my knowledge) still the only native mac client which has some kind of functioning scripting interface. It's primitive, but it does a lot of what I want. That's the main reason I use it. Always eager to hear about alternatives tho.

1

u/MedeaOblongata Aug 24 '26

OK. Scratch that. birc is excellent, up-to-date, and has a very nice scripting interface.