A very quick and light (but powerful)
IRC client for the
Macintosh. In contrast to the other popular Mac IRC client
Ircle, which is very
bloated and has a built-in
video streaming feature that nobody uses, ShadowIRC is simpler and has only those features people would actually
use, including a number of features the alternatives don't have but should, such as
cursor focusing and
proxy support via
SOCKS.
ShadowIRC lacks a few of the GUI frontends to common IRC tasks that some other IRC clients have, opting to rely on text commands, but this is unimportant because it has an extremely powerful plug-in architecture, which allows you to add in literally any feature or modification you want. Good examples include the plugin that gives you an MIRC-style "channel bar" that lets you hide windows and then alerts you when a channel has new traffic, and the plugins to deal with special obscure CTCP requests. The plugins make ShadowIRC very flexible; in fact, a few features that are part of the base client download, (such as the userlist) are actually implemented as plugins so that if a user does not like the way that feature works, they can write their own as a replacement. The idea is to start with an extremely simple, minimalist base client, and the user can then add those features that are important to them.