WeeChat

WeeChat is a free and open-source Internet Relay Chat client that is designed to be light and fast. It is released under the terms of the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later and has been developed since 2003.
WeeChat comes with a default ncurses interface, and it is possible to use other interfaces through the use of the relay plugin.

WWW Official Site 𝕏 weechatclient

Features

WeeChat's features include:

IPv6
SSL
Proxy connections
The screen can be split up to display multiple windows at the same time.
Incremental text search
Aspell support for spell checking
Scripting support for many languages
FIFO pipes for remote control
Support for multiple character encodings
User-defined aliases and shortkeys

Supported platforms

WeeChat supports most platforms and operating systems, including Linux, BSD, macOS, Debian GNU/Hurd, HP-UX, Solaris, QNX, Haiku, and Microsoft Windows.
Binary packages and builds of WeeChat are available for installation as well as the source code for self compilation. This includes most Linux distributions and BSD package management systems, such as Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva Linux, Fedora, Gentoo Linux, Arch Linux, FreeBSD via the FreeBSD Ports system, OpenBSD via the Ports collection, as well on NetBSD via Pkgsrc.

Reception

In his review for Free Software Magazine, Martin Brown graded WeeChat with 43 points out of a possible 50, noting that "At first glance, WeeChat is not as friendly or easy to use as Rhapsody", but, "There’s a lot of hidden power built into the application", including Python, Perl, Ruby and Lua extensions which can be selected at installation.