IRC On Your Phone

If you're like me, you miss the good old IRC days. If you don't know, IRC is a powerful and refreshingly utilitarian social network that has been around forever.

While MySpacers were blinging out their homepages with horrible gifs that tanked everyone's AOL dialup, IRC was quietly doing its thing.

When the 'get rich by blogging' thing happened, IRC was still there doing its thing.

While Facebookers politick and generally piss each other off, IRC is still alive doing its thing.

If you're sick of bloated apps and websites hosing your CPU and or battery, ditch those social feeds and jump on the text-only IRC networks. I'll talk more about IRC itself in the future. Here I just want to give you some tools to get you started IRC'ing on your phone. I've only used a couple different tools on my phone so I will start with those. Surely in the future I will be sharing more.

For the Faint of Heart
(In other words, the sane ones)

AndChat for Android is a great IRC client. I tried a couple others but AndChat seems to be the best, so far, at keeping and re-establishing IRC connections. The connection is the roughest part when using IRC on your phone. Its interface is clean and clutter free. You can set up multiple saved servers and auto join channels etc. I am kind of a basic IRC user so I haven't explored its other tools. I just do my work manually, in IRC.

For the Nerds
(me)

IRSSI. I love me some IRSSI. It is a console based IRC client that has been around forever. It's powerful and can be extended with scripts. Minimalists can run it without any tweaks etc and enjoy its scant interface, but I believe it can be tweaked to have more GUI elements. I'll have to research that.
It isn't going to be native to your phone so you're going to have to find another way to run it (This is - in part - why I say it's for nerds). I personally use GnuRoot Debian and install IRSSI via apt, just like I would on a desktop.

Enjoy checking out IRC. And watch for future IRC topics!