I stopped using Irssi a while ago. Since I was not using any bouncer, it was running on a server at my lab, and I connected to the client via ssh. That was fine, though. Soju has been on my radar for quite a moment, and yesterday I set up a free account on IRC Today to try it out together with Senpai. I know it is tightly tied to SourceHut users, but you can use it without a bouncer as well. It works great with IRC Today, and the config is so much easier compared to what I had in my Irssi config.

address "irctoday.com"
nickname "even4void"
on-highlight-beep true
pane-widths {
  nicknames 10
  channels 0
  members 16
}
colors {
  status disabled
  nicks fixed
}

The password can be managed outside the config file if desired, by the way. I may eventually switch to SourceHut Soju instance if I’m happy with this client. The price are reasonably low, and they offer Mercurial and bpaste services in addition to traditional Git and lists, but see Setting up IRC with soju and senpai to learn how to configure their IRC bouncer. See also this lobste.rs thread about Goguma, the soju bouncer and the senpai IRC.

From what I’ve seen so far, Senpai has a clean UI, with mouse-enabled action. No distraction, it’s just pure text and you hide all side panels if you like. Everything just works out of the box, without the need of extra plugin like in Irssi, and the chat history is preserved on screen even after you /quit. IRC Today offers one week of chat history on their free tiers.

It’s time for the traditional screenshot, yet another TUI in my toolshed.

IRC is a venerable 37 year old chat protocol used by many open-source software projects, technical experts happily lending their help and other discussion groups. However, the historic IRC protocol is not always well-suited to modern usage, such as connecting from multiple devices with unreliable connectivity, or connecting from battery-constrained mobile devices. — Chatting on IRC in 2025: grandpa, what’s up?