Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client

I am glad you like it, macmac.

What channels are still active? I connected to freenode for the first time in years a few months ago and it was a ghost town. Would love to get back into some programming/tech communities on IRC.

Agreed on the tabs. Not sure what I'm supposed to do when I have more than 1-2 channels I want to view.

I added this configuration to make it works more tab-like.

    [actions.sidebar]
    buffer = "replace-pane"

to have it act a bit more tabishly, https://halloy.chat/configuration/actions.html#buffer can be set to "replace-pane"

tabs are the reason i abandoned my halloy experiment. I'm currently following the halloy issue.

if you type /mode it should show the mode next to the channel name. this should happen automatically - will look into that. i'll also add the nick-user mode next to the input field. a few has requested it.

I had the same question. I briefly joined the Slackware IRC a long, long time ago when I had questions, but now I wouldn't even know what to do with this client.

#freenode was generally the main IRC node I used with all the good dev rooms.

Seems to still be chugging along. You can even join directly via their web-client: https://freenode.net.

Personally I still use pidgin.im to connect to all the relevant #freenode goodness. Seems people forget it still works and is pretty great even all these years later :).

> I’d like to use this but I don’t know what to do with it since the advent of Discord. What do people do with IRC now and where do you find content?

IRC is for people to whom the word "content" sounds right out of Idiocracy. :)

I wouldn't go poking around IRC today looking for random passive content consumption. There's more of that pretty much everywhere else on the Internet.

Go to IRC, in a goal-directed way, if an open source project you use is OG enough to have an IRC channel (rather than a open source backsliding Discord) that you want to access.

If you're involved in IT incident response for a company, there is a chance that running a simple private IRC server that's entirely separate from all your other infrastructure is useful. You'll need to make sure ahead of time that everyone who needs to access it urgently, when everything else is blowing up, will be able to.

Chaos Communication Congress has channels on Hackint network #39c3 #39c3-offtopic (both bridged to Matrix)

https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2025/39c3-power-cycles

These are some of the most active channels:

https://netsplit.de/channels/?net=Libera.Chat

There are some other nets listed on that site with somewhat lower usercounts:

https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php

I am currently writing a desktop application in Rust. It’s a jellyfin client for music.

I think the main reason is that writing Rust is a joy that gives you confidence. This is important to me as I often have small amounts of time to work on it (new dad). With rust I can start implementing a small feature, as long as it compiles I can be reasonably sure it works. In Python I’d be wading through a sea of runtime errors and never quite sure I actually got it right.

Cross platform is another good reason. UI library support is good. You have iced like this app, but also decent GTK bindings.

No runtime needed makes distribution and packaging infinitely easier than Python.

It’s a great language for writing desktop apps.

There I quite a lot of desktop apps in Python. But for example if you use Tkinter, it looks awful on Linux and if you choose Gtk, you need to build the python version on Windows manually in minGW or ship Cygwin.

Rust produces a single binary. Developers appreciate this when shipping an app. For Python based apps you usually need your user to have Python installed and then ship a bunch of Python files with interop to some non-Python UI library. So you probably need to ship the UI library as a dependency too.

Or you can just build it in Rust and learn what .unwrap() does.

There are no languages with good GUI frameworks except C, C++ and C#. All other bindings typically suck ass.

It just works, it can do most anything, and it binds well with C.

Funny how nobody has actually addressed your question, choosing to praise rust instead..

The answer is that there are several python GUI applications (a dozen music players, Cura, Calibre, Anki, Deluge, etc). Hardly any Go because all bindings suck (which isn't that surprising, go devs are often hostile to cgo) and there's no (non toy) native toolkit either. I'd don't know why that is. Every few years I look for one but I give up and write the UI for my Go tool in html instead...

Go and Java are actively hostile to integrating with C libraries, and the easiest way to make clean native UI on all 3 major OSs is to link with C libraries.

There's also something akin to the Python Paradox here: https://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Rust is an interesting and intellectually stimulating language, it lets you use your brain to write clean and pretty code, and rewards you for making clean powerful abstractions.

Java and Go are both anti-intellectual languages that reward you for turning off your brain and writing the most verbose awful code you can think of, and will leave anyone who has ever studied type-theory with a massive migraine for hours after each coding session (go moreso than java).

I think those two factors, C bindings, and whether they respect the programmer's intelligence, are the main reason.

Given the other answers here focusing on the single binary as the main benefit, Go would seem the only competitor of those listed and Go lacks good support for GUIs. Most GUIs are written in C/C++ and Go doesn't have as good a story for C/C++ integration (community convention is to generally avoid it if at all possible). IMO as Zig matures you'll see it grow as a language for GUIs. You get the same cross platform support, single binary generation and C integration with better tooling and a language with a significantly lower cognitive load.

Latency. Go and Java with optimizations can work just fine, Python not so much yet.

With Python I find that distribution is too much of a pain (I don’t mind creating a virtual env for a cli tool but for a GUI forget it). I love that go links everything statically and so far I haven’t had any problems running rust tools.

Fast. Explicit. Safe. Cross-platform.

Did I mention fast?

I've tried writing GUIs with Python in the past and it was a bit tricky to get the pieces working.

The one Python GUI that comes to mind that is also, like, not garbage looking is Anki.

> Can someone please tell me what special about Rust?

I think I've seen this topic pop up from time to time ;)

For me personally, I've been replacing a lot of my Python programs with Rust. A lot of it isn't much harder to write, and things like sum types are sorely missed when I write Python or most non-Rust languages. And usually, if my Rust program is a lot more difficult to write, it's because I'm exploring an optimization that wouldn't be possible or worthwhile in Python. Having an application be native and compiled is a big plus for me. I plan to release a desktop app in Rust but it isn't at that stage yet.

I can't speak to rust but I think the reason you see CLI tools and Servers written in GO is simply because that is where the language really shines. I don't think it would be very much fun to develop a desktop GUI app in GO.

Go is kind of verbose and just a bit hostile towards fancy structural features and complex abstractions. I think rust is kind of the opposite of GO in a lot of ways, even though they theoretically should be targeting a lot of the same use-cases.

I have a background in macOS applications, back when it was Objective-C. I have always loved native apps. When i decided to start Halloy the goal was to create a native application for multiple platforms, and for that Rust is perfect.

I can tell you that writing Java GUI applications is hell. You have the following libraries:

AWT - still actually under-pining the others, but very ugly to work with

Swing - basically runs on top of AWT, with the same design model, plays badly with it. Is hard to write in a testable way, is prone to embedding business logic in UI components

JavaFX - all the worst parts of business Java with all the worst parts of XML and also the worst parts of a game engine. Now you need to care about 'adding a scene to a stage'.

The principle core technology that made Java good was applets. Since they were killed by mobile, the reason for delivering a Java app is functionally zero. You will need to ship a JVM which you need to update alongside your app.

Java is a great back-end development language and a really poor GUI language.

These days you should either ship an Electron app or native code.

Funny enough, having close to zero experience with Rust and wanting to build an iced-rs application with Claude Code, I asked it to search github for large projects using iced-rs to use as a reference and Halloy ones one of the top 3.

I was just looking at that; I've been wanting a nice GUI library for Rust but never found one I liked. A number of them were bindings to other GUI stacks. I might try Iced next time I'm poking around with Rust.

AFAIU not yet because the underlying GUI framework doesn't support this, but the developer mentioned they'd definitely be interested in adding it.

Here's the link for those curious:

Show HN: Halloy – A GUI Application in Rust for IRC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535772 - June 2023 (101 comments)

Please file bug reports or feature requests when you find them, if they haven't been filed already. Don't just leave silently. And not just for halloy, but for all FOSS projects in general. The developers/maintainers can choose what to do with them - but they'll at least be aware of the pain points. That too is a contribution to the projects that we use for free.

PS: This assumes that you haven't done so. But even if you did, please leave it as a request to everyone else.

Iced also has a roadmap: https://whimsical.com/roadmap-iced-7vhq6R35Lp3TmYH4WeYwLM

Screen reader accessibility is at least on it, although not until the release after next.

The extensive IRCv3 support for one thing. chathistory support in particular is a big one for me since we rely on it on my personal server.

If you scroll down to the Features section on the linked page that gives a good overview.