XChat is a useful IRC (chat) application for Windows and UNIX (Linux/BSD) operating systems.

I.R.C. is Internet Relay Chat. XChat runs on most BSD and POSIX compliant operating systems.

Limitations:

· 30 days trial

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· The lag-o-meter now has a full-scale of 1.0 seconds and turns different colours (green, yellow, red).
· The /timer plugin is now loaded before other plugins/scripts so they can make use of it.
· The tray icon now responds to mouse-release events instead of mouse-press to avoid a bug on Vista [forum post].
· The Drag&Drop files to userlist feature has been enabled again.
· Changing the time-stamp format now applies the new setting instantly (in 2.8.5e it wouldn't fit in the margin until a restart).
· If you have an SSL cert/key, it can now be loaded from C:Program FilesXChatclient.pem or .pem (requires OpenSSL).
· The Alerts settings now accept wildcards, instead of partitial string match [1807563]. This avoids the problem of people with very short nicks getting too many highlights.
· Changing away status during reconnect/disconnect will now remember it.
· You can now change your Away/Back status (all networks) in the tray menu.
· Favorite Channels / Auto-Join-List management: Network List window now has a "..." button to edit the auto-join-list in a more friendly way / Channel(text area), Tree/Tab and Channel-List right-click menus now have a Add/Remove function. / Previous limit of 300 bytes has been overcome. Now up to 2 KB worth of channels/keys can be joined and it will be automatically split into multiple lines, if necessary. / Per-Channel settings now save to disk, including Logging and Scrollback settings. / /ChanOpt has been re-worked to be more like /Set.
· 'hostname:port' syntax is now accepted, if it's not an IPv6 address. This should avoid confusion.
· The Notify List has been renamed to Friends List, so it's more obvious what it is.
· The Userlist right-click menu now has icons and an option to add to friends list. If you've edited this menu before you'll still get the old one. To get the new one delete XChatDirpopup.conf while XChat isn't running.
· When there's missing information in the Userlist right-click menu, it'll issue a silent /WHOIS and fill it in. This includes retrieving a person's away-reason.
· A few GUI, menu and tray icons have been improved.
· startup.txt is now loaded on launch (like /LOAD -e). It's a text file full of commands to execute when XChat starts (optional).
· The /Menu command's -i parameter can now be a file relative to Icons.
· The tree/tab right-click menu has been reorganized.
· The Channel List window now shows bold, underline, italic and mIRC colors.
· Added support for QuakeNet's /AUTH for nick password, when numeric 005 NETWORK=QuakeNet is detected.
· You can now copy with IRC attributes and mIRC colors if CTRL key is down when a selection is finished (on mouse release). This replaces the old "Color paste" feature.
· The input box and topic bar support editing with attributes (bold, underline etc) and mIRC colors.
· Added a 'compact' flag to gui_tweaks. This'll make the userlist and tree spacing smaller. E.g. type /set -or gui_tweaks 32 and restart to turn it on.
· Improved the reconnect logic. If a network is already open but disconnected, it'll now get re-used if you use the Network List and connect to that same network.
· text_stripcolor can now be set to different values 0-Off 1-Strip Messages 2-Strip Topic 3-Strip Both.
· The /Clear command takes a number as paramater (how many lines to clear).
· With the input-box in focus, CTRL-ALT-o will now open xchat's data folder.
· Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when joining a channel you've been in before. Caused by a bug in re-loading the scrollback (Thanks to Warpath).
· Plugin API: Fixed a bug where not all 32 elements were available in word[] and word_eol[].
· Plugin API: xchat_emit_print will now trigger Sound, Blink, Icon etc type events, depending on user's settings.