Developer(s) Sébastien Helleu | Development status Active | |
 | ||
Initial release June 26, 2003; 13 years ago (2003-06-26) Stable release 1.7 (January 15, 2017; 2 months ago (2017-01-15)) [±] Preview release 1.8-dev / Nightly build | ||
WeeChat (Wee Enhanced Environment for Chat) is a free and open-source Internet Relay Chat client, which is designed to be light and fast. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License 3 and has been developed since 2003.
Contents
WeeChat comes with a default ncurses interface, but it is possible to use other interfaces (e.g. Glowing Bear, a web frontend).
Features
WeeChat's features include:
Supported platforms
WeeChat supports most platforms and operating systems, including Linux, BSD, macOS, Debian GNU/Hurd, HP-UX, Solaris, QNX, Haiku, and Microsoft Windows (via the Cygwin library and API).
Binary packages and builds of WeeChat are available for installation as well as the source code for self compilation. This includes most Linux distributions and BSD package management systems, such as Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva Linux, Fedora, Gentoo Linux, Arch Linux, FreeBSD via the FreeBSD Ports system, OpenBSD via the Ports collection, as well on NetBSD via Pkgsrc.
Reception
In his review for Free Software Magazine, Martin Brown graded WeeChat with 43 points out of a possible 50, noting that "At first glance, WeeChat is not as friendly or easy to use as Rhapsody", but, "There’s a lot of hidden power built into the application", including Python, Perl, Ruby and Lua extensions which can be selected at installation.