Sunsetting Textual IRC Client
Textual is the world’s most popular application for interacting with Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chatrooms on macOS.
[…]
Textual supports very powerful modern technologies such as the latest IRCv3 specifications, native IPv6, client-side certificate authentication, and much, much more in an easy to navigate, clutter free experience.
Unfortunately (via Jan Lehnardt):
Textual has been sunset and will no longer receive updates.
Previously:
Update (2026-07-10): rob:
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is having a bit of a revival in one of the communities I participate in (we ditched Discord), but there are not that many clients for Apple devices?
I’m currently using Goguma on mobile and Halloy on desktop, but they both don’t feel like native apps… (technology stack and especially UI/UX)
[…]
Luckily I recently discovered Mango, which looks very promising.
I would still love to have a modern version of Ircle. Nothing else comes close as the best example of a Mac IRC client.
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Textual was lacking for a while. I vibe coded my own IRC client using Claude and it feels 10x better already.
@Anonymous Textual’s source code is freely available and undoubtedly part of Claude’s training set, so maybe one reason you find it lacking is that people have been running it through the plagiarism launderer and calling it “my own IRC client” instead of contributing to its improvement.
Does anyone have a suggestion for a good (or indeed any) IRC client for macOS these days? Something that isn't a single window iPad app, or electron, etc.
Vale Ircle, Colloquoy, etc.
Halloy looks like it might be a viable option, and it *seems* like it might support draggable / undockable windows / panels.
What the hell am I supposed to use now? I’ve been using Textual for more than I can remember and without it… life will be dull.
I guess best case scenario is to fork it and just… maintain it?
@Someone: Halloy works pretty well, it doesn't have any level of spell checking on any platform yet as it doesn't use native text inputs. It is a ticket in their backlog.
I personally use senpai with soju as a bouncer and the experience is quite nice, but it is a TUI, which many people don't care for. They recently added spell checking and correction if you install the harper lsp for it to lean on.
