General Questions

What is xchat-gnome ?

xchat-gnome is a new frontend for the popular X-Chat IRC client targeted towards the GNOME platform. Our eventual goals include full desktop integration and HIG compliance.

Why is xchat-gnome ?

X-Chat has been a popular and successful open-source IRC client for some time now. It is undebateably a stable, powerful and fully featured client, as proven by the number of faithful users it maintains. Unfortunately, X-Chat’s user interface became cluttered over time as more features were gradually added. We view xchat-gnome as an opportunity to clean up the X-Chat user interface while (eventually ;)) keeping the stability and power that X-Chat users have come to expect.

Installation

How to xchat-gnome

xchat-gnome packages can be obtained from repositories of almost all GNU/Linux/Unix/*BSD distributions that offer the GNOME desktop environment, so see your package management software.

Can you provide packages for my distro ?

Probably not. There are some people who contribute packages for their particular distributions, and we’re happy to host/provide links to these packages, but it’s really not worth our time to learn the ins and outs of packaging for every distribution, especially when there are so many expert packagers out there.

How to compile xchat-gnome

In case there is no precompiled package for your distribution available, or if you want to build a newer version that available, or if you want to contribute a patch, you need to compile xchat-gnome from source yourself.

See the Technical Guide section of wiki:GnomeLove and especially this document for more information about how to build a GNOME package from source. You will also need to use "DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES" flag, as documented at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/CleanupGTKIncludes (586222)

Configuration

What’s up with the new user list pop-up ?

When xchat-gnome was first written, we stuck the user list in the main UI, just like we were all used to. It was in a different spot, but it seemed natural that it should be there. As we used it more, we realized something. In order to be useful, the user list was taking up a lot of space, but we were rarely even looking at it. And so, it got hidden behind a button, and pops up. This gives us several advantages, but one in particular guided the decision. It doesn’t use up a lot of space in the main UI, but when it’s shown, we can make it stretch vertically to the entire height of the screen

In future ( v0.26.3 onwards ) , you might have an option to display user list (323488)

Changing proxy settings

Currently xchat-gnome does not provide an option to modify proxy settings (331607). In future, it would be possible to uses the GNOME default proxies by using gnome-network-preferences. The corresponding gconf keys are  /system/http_proxy/host, /system/http_proxy/port, /system/http_proxy/use_http_proxy and /system/proxy/mode (set to manual).