I'm just curious if there are many people who prefer to use BitchX as an IRC client v.s using a GUI client like Xchat. I see that Xchat is standard install on Slackware 13.37, but BitchX is not (which kind of surprises me for this distro). If you are familiar with both do you think there are any advantages of one over the other functionality wise?

I also wonder how many young people these days even know what IRC is...does anyone even use IRC anymore?

What I like about bitchx is that I can run it on a remote machine under screen
and don't need to worry about disconnects, or graphics problems ;}

That's one reason I used BitchX in that past when I used IRC a lot. I did a little research after posting this thread to see what Google turned up on this topic, and I found an old thread here on LQ about this topic. What was interesting to me about the thread was that there was mention about BitchX being removed from Slackware years ago because of security holes. I also read that it was replaced with irssi so I gave it a try a few minutes ago. To me is seems very much like BitchX so I'll tinker with it for a while.

There is however something nostalgic about using the old BitchX. Even though it's ran from the terminal the program has a personality all of it's own that I remember liking. If there truely are known security holes in the program I think I will stick with Irssi, but is any IRC client really security hole free. I mean we are talking about IRC...