Textual IRC has been sunset and although it still works with Libera.Chat, it doesn’t seem to handle history replay from modern bouncers like soju. At the beginning of the year I subscribed to the free plan on https://irctoday.com: one week of history is enough to keep track of any channel I’m following or to engage in quick conversations, and I only use Libera.Chat. They use soju which you find otherwise at the heart of sourcehut hosted chat services. It’s really great, I no longer need to let Irssi run in the background on a distant server. Now I use senpai at the command line, and bIRC when I want a native app sitting in my Dock:

I’m no John Gruber, but I can only confirm that this app is simply excellent and comprehensive. The only thing to remember is to use the username/server convention to identify your account on bouncer.¹ There may be another way to do that, but that’s how we did with Textual and ZNC bouncer. By the way, I also bought the pro version even if I wouldn’t need all these new features.

First off, you have a native Mac app which means ⌘, brings a Preferences window you’re all familiar with, and not a TOML or YAML file to edit with your preferred text editor. And it’s full of options ranging from very basic and classical one (system notification, highlight, custom away message, etc.) as well as more modern IRC features (so called IRC v3) which I’m not much familiar with, except that I known it brings us a bit closer to the features available on Matrix. Besides SASL auth, we get things like reactions (as in modern chat apps) or message tags. See also New And Upcoming IRCv3 Features on Libera.Chat.

With bIRC you can search for specific messages, get a log of your current session (login, auth, etc.), check your highlights across all channels, upload file via FILEHOST when available, and sending a direct message is just a matter of selecting a user in the user list on the right panel and right clicking.

And you know what, when you start to get older, you appreciate being able to change default font size or to get access to the classical macOS shortcut to increase current font size ;-)

When I look at bIRC, it looks like senpai but with with all the little extras that make macOS what it is. Congrats to the author of this gem!