Actually, X-Chat is not for
GNOME only. The later versions (1.2 and up, and most likely earlier ones as well) only require the
Gimp Toolkit (GTK+) to run. It works with any
window manager, including
WindowMaker and
Sawmill, and it works with vanilla
XFree86, it does not require
GNOME (although it does have support for
GNOME-specific features.) Likewise, X-Chat is not made solely for Linux, it will compile on any
POSIX Unix system. I, personally, ran X-chat on
FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE with
WindowMaker and it worked fine.
X-chat, on the whole, tries to emulate the feel of mIRC, for Win32. It separates channels into their own windows, and it has a tab panel to manage server consoles and channels, as well as DCC chats and query sessions. It supports numerous scripting methods, including Perl and Python. It also supports most of the convenience features offered by clients such as mIRC, Ircle or BitchX, including aliases, popups, and server lists. All in all, a very nice GUI client.
At the time of this writeup, the current version of X-Chat is 1.6.0 1.8.0. The website for X-chat is http://www.xchat.org.