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PoxChat

PoxChat

PoxChat is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) app for Linux, Windows, Mac & more. It is based around GTK4 and supports the expanded IRCv3 features including replies, history, reactions, etc. This is not release-ready — expect bugs, rough edges, and the occasional crash. It was originally forked from the now archived/unmaintained app HexChat

Upstream HexChat documentation still applies for most basics (FAQ, Python API, Perl API).

What's new in this fork

  • gtk4 many UI/UX improvements
  • IRCv3 3.1/3.2 core: multi-prefix, away-notify, account-notify, extended-join, server-time, userhost-in-names, cap-notify, chghost, setname, invite-notify, account-tag.
  • IRCv3 message framework: message-tags, batch, echo-message, labeled-response.
  • SASL: PLAIN, EXTERNAL, SCRAM-SHA-1/256/512, OAUTHBEARER.
  • IRCv3 drafts (wired up, some with caveats — see below): chathistory, multiline, event-playback, read-marker, message-redaction, metadata-2, channel-rename, pre-away, account-registration, extended-isupport.

Known rough edges

  • Persistence features (chathistory / read-marker / metadata-2) don't yet surface auth-required failures gracefully — on servers that require login for history, requests just silently fail.
  • Intermittent crashes: opening the quit dialog; closing the find bar.
  • Pane collapse can clip on fast drags.
  • Chanview tree dotted-line indentation is currently broken.
  • Display lists in compact mode/Chanview smaller text is incomplete.
  • macOS integration is designed but not yet implemented.

Building

Windows (Visual Studio)

Open win32/poxchat.sln in Visual Studio 2022. Build dependencies come from gvsbuild built for GTK4, plus a separately installed OpenSSL. Optional: libwebsockets, jansson, libcurl for OAuth2.

win32/poxchat.props contains environment-specific paths and is not committed.

Linux (Meson)

meson setup builddir
meson compile -C builddir

Debian-family dependencies:

sudo apt install build-essential meson ninja-build gettext libgtk-4-dev libssl-dev \
  libdbus-glib-1-dev libcanberra-dev libnotify-dev liblua5.4-dev libpython3-dev \
  libperl-dev libx11-dev python3-cffi libluajit-5.1-dev libpci-dev python3-dev \
  desktop-file-utils libsqlite3-dev libjansson-dev libsoup-3.0-dev libwebsockets-dev \
  libsecret-1-dev
X-Chat ("xchat") Copyright (c) 1998-2010 By Peter Zelezny. HexChat ("hexchat") Copyright (c) 2009-2014 By Berke Viktor. PoxChat fork Copyright (c) 2026- Evilnet contributors. This program is released under the GPL v2 with the additional exemption that compiling, linking, and/or using OpenSSL is allowed. You may provide binary packages linked to the OpenSSL libraries, provided that all other requirements of the GPL are met. See file COPYING for details.