Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client
github.comI started working on Halloy back in 2022, with the goal of giving something back to the community I’ve been a part of for the past two decades. I wanted to create a modern, multi-platform IRC client written in Rust.
Three years later, I’ve made new friends who have become core contributors, and there are now over 200 people idling in our #halloy channel on Libera.
My hope is that this client will outlive me and that IRC will live on.
I'd love to test this, however it seems to not be accessible with screen readers. I assume this is because of the GUI library not supporting accessibility. I found an open issue about this on the Iced GitHub where in 2024 it was mentioned that the version after next should support it, and the last comment was in february of this year (https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/552)
I bookmarked this so hopefully once that effort gets further along I can give it a try!
I figured I'd leave this comment so that some folks can see that there are real people even on HN who require these features and that accessibility work is always appreciated. We definitely exist :)
I've tried to use this, but I'm on multiple servers with tons of channels, and it gets a bit unwieldy without tabs. I also can't get it to minimize to tray, and having to "keep it open" at all times is somewhat annoying. I'll stick with Quassel for now.
Really impressive work though, you should be proud!
I added this configuration to make it works more tab-like.
tabs are the reason i abandoned my halloy experiment. I'm currently following the halloy issue.
What channels are still active? I connected to freenode for the first time in years a few months ago and it was a ghost town. Would love to get back into some programming/tech communities on IRC.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/major-internet-projects-are-...
A lot of users left freenode in 2021.
Many moved to Libera.chat instead. While others may have moved on from IRC altogether when they left freenode.
Freenode melted down a few years back, there was a lot of drama around what happened, but I don't think it's active anymore and if it is, it's probably not what you remember. The community splintered and moved to other hosts.
Agreed on the tabs. Not sure what I'm supposed to do when I have more than 1-2 channels I want to view.
to have it act a bit more tabishly, https://halloy.chat/configuration/actions.html#buffer can be set to "replace-pane"
halloy is not only an awesome app but a fantastic example if you want to learn more about building GUI software with iced.
https://github.com/iced-rs/iced
If you're interested in building a GUI app in Rust, I encourage you to go through the examples and showcase apps like halloy
and if you get stuck, can ask our chill and helpful community on Discord https://discord.gg/3xZJ65GAhd
Funny enough, having close to zero experience with Rust and wanting to build an iced-rs application with Claude Code, I asked it to search github for large projects using iced-rs to use as a reference and Halloy ones one of the top 3.
I was just looking at that; I've been wanting a nice GUI library for Rust but never found one I liked. A number of them were bindings to other GUI stacks. I might try Iced next time I'm poking around with Rust.
It's so nice that we finally have some decent IRCv3 capable clients: Halloy (GUI), Senpai (CLI), Goguma (mobile), Gamja (web). Combined with a v3 capable server like Ergo you can get an excellent modern chat experience even without a bouncer. chathistory support in particular makes a huge difference.
I've started to notice there are a lot more rust based desktop application appearing vs say Go based or Java. Most of these apps are cross platforms. My guess is they are trying to compete with Electron. There is Tauri runs on Rust.
Can someone please tell me what special about Rust? Say, why aren't desktop application popular based on say Python?
On tangent, ive seen a lot of terminal base application in typescript and go
I am currently writing a desktop application in Rust. It’s a jellyfin client for music.
I think the main reason is that writing Rust is a joy that gives you confidence. This is important to me as I often have small amounts of time to work on it (new dad). With rust I can start implementing a small feature, as long as it compiles I can be reasonably sure it works. In Python I’d be wading through a sea of runtime errors and never quite sure I actually got it right.
Cross platform is another good reason. UI library support is good. You have iced like this app, but also decent GTK bindings.
No runtime needed makes distribution and packaging infinitely easier than Python.
It’s a great language for writing desktop apps.
As a user, I agree, I really like downloading a single, small binary that is a full-fledged desktop app. Hell, I downloaded Halloy just because it wasn't Electron, and it looks really nice, too!
I have a background in macOS applications, back when it was Objective-C. I have always loved native apps. When i decided to start Halloy the goal was to create a native application for multiple platforms, and for that Rust is perfect.
> Can someone please tell me what special about Rust?
I think I've seen this topic pop up from time to time ;)
For me personally, I've been replacing a lot of my Python programs with Rust. A lot of it isn't much harder to write, and things like sum types are sorely missed when I write Python or most non-Rust languages. And usually, if my Rust program is a lot more difficult to write, it's because I'm exploring an optimization that wouldn't be possible or worthwhile in Python. Having an application be native and compiled is a big plus for me. I plan to release a desktop app in Rust but it isn't at that stage yet.
There I quite a lot of desktop apps in Python. But for example if you use Tkinter, it looks awful on Linux and if you choose Gtk, you need to build the python version on Windows manually in minGW or ship Cygwin.
Given the other answers here focusing on the single binary as the main benefit, Go would seem the only competitor of those listed and Go lacks good support for GUIs. Most GUIs are written in C/C++ and Go doesn't have as good a story for C/C++ integration (community convention is to generally avoid it if at all possible). IMO as Zig matures you'll see it grow as a language for GUIs. You get the same cross platform support, single binary generation and C integration with better tooling and a language with a significantly lower cognitive load.
Latency. Go and Java with optimizations can work just fine, Python not so much yet.
There are no languages with good GUI frameworks except C, C++ and C#. All other bindings typically suck ass.
And presumably C# is just binding to some native toolkit
If I had to simply bind to a native toolkit, I think Lazrus can do that. Having loved Delphi back in the day, I think I'd prefer to write ObjectPascal for anything more than a very simple utility. C# would likely be my second choice.
Yes, but C# is very nice as a language for GUI, can't explain it, just feels right.
Rust produces a single binary. Developers appreciate this when shipping an app. For Python based apps you usually need your user to have Python installed and then ship a bunch of Python files with interop to some non-Python UI library. So you probably need to ship the UI library as a dependency too.
Or you can just build it in Rust and learn what .unwrap() does.
I don't say it is best, but there are solutions like pyinstaller [0] to produce a binary from python code.
[0] https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/
It just works, it can do most anything, and it binds well with C.
Also much easier to manage packages, which for me it’s the differentiating factor.
Fast. Explicit. Safe. Cross-platform.
Did I mention fast?
Used to use Hexchat and swapped to halloy more than a year ago and couldn't be happier. The development is coming along nicely and a lot of modern features got added since I've been using it. It's a joy to use in conjunction with soju and my irc experience hasn't been this smooth in a long time.
Nice! I'll give it whirl. For those with terrible eyesight, do you offer accessibility options?
EFNet for life!
AFAIU not yet because the underlying GUI framework doesn't support this, but the developer mentioned they'd definitely be interested in adding it.
I haven't used IRC in years, but my teenage of ~12 years ago would've been stoked by this, it's the nicest client I've seen as of yet. Cheers!
I use it, it's really good and getting better every release.
It's fast and robust. The toml config is also straight forward.
Highly recommended!
PS: I preferred the old (bird) icon
Thank you.
Halloy is a wonderfully configurable replacement for beloved Mac IRC client Textual, whose development has sadly wound down (now officially, as of last month).
I hope it continues to grow in popularity while keeping performance and privacy at the core.
I use Halloy on a daily basis and could not be happier. It is super smooth in use and highly configurable using the config file. Halloy is also a great show case for the iced GUI framework and Rust for desktop apps.
I am glad you like it, macmac.
I can't at the top of my head remember all the minor annoyances I ran into when I tried Halloy, but things like not being able to paste a large message because "it exceeds the single message limit" was a real dealbreaker.
I ended up going for Crossover and mIRC
Reminds me I haven't logged in to IRC in.. maybe 2-3 years now. It just kind of fizzled out as the main groups of people I interact with moved to Discord. But I kind of miss IRC.
Hey, this looks pretty cool and it is very snappy compared to, say, Konversation. It would be fantastic if there was a way to add AppIndicator support and allow the main window to be closed.
Wow, I used this when you first posted a public link to it and I see it’s come a long way since; I should definitely check it out again! Congrats on the success thus far!
Here's the link for those curious:
Show HN: Halloy – A GUI Application in Rust for IRC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535772 - June 2023 (101 comments)
I'm amazed people still use IRC! More power to you. I used to use it a fair bit back in the day bit the last programming community that I was a part of that used IRC moved to Discord around 2020 which is when I basically stopped using it.
It's my go-to client. Kudos and thanks for developing it!
i've been very happy with the combination of senpai on my laptop, goguna on Android, and soju on a cloud instance for persistence. i will try this as an alternative laptop frontend.
Actually surprised I never stumbled on this while I was looking for an IRC client. I ended up on on The Lounge for a while and that's always been pretty good.
Will give this a go because I would always prefer a native client in the first place and this looks excellent!
Can it show channel modes next to the #channel_name and my nick+user mode next to the input field? Two things I find very useful in weechat and couldn't work out how to do in Halloy last time I tried it out.
Thanks for making a client.
if you type /mode it should show the mode next to the channel name. this should happen automatically - will look into that. i'll also add the nick-user mode next to the input field. a few has requested it.
Thanks! Having both always visible would be ideal for me.
I'm sure Timo thought the same about irssi.
Wow, that's really cool! I just adopted it :)
wow nice !
Looks really great. But I am gonna stick to weechat :)
Excellent. I never liked mIRC, and for me the terminal was the best interface. But this looks good. I also still use vi. Never made the mental leap to vim. Old habits die hard.
I switched to it some months ago and couldn't be happier. Was a die hard irssi user before but there are some parts of halloy that are just really convenient. Maybe I am getting older.
Not sure if this question will get removed but a tangent nonetheless - I’d like to use this but I don’t know what to do with it since the advent of Discord. What do people do with IRC now and where do you find content?
I remember being a high school student and having an amazing physics conversation on IRC that included a description of Flatworld that really fascinated me.
> I’d like to use this but I don’t know what to do with it since the advent of Discord. What do people do with IRC now and where do you find content?
IRC is for people to whom the word "content" sounds right out of Idiocracy. :)
I wouldn't go poking around IRC today looking for random passive content consumption. There's more of that pretty much everywhere else on the Internet.
Go to IRC, in a goal-directed way, if an open source project you use is OG enough to have an IRC channel (rather than a open source backsliding Discord) that you want to access.
If you're involved in IT incident response for a company, there is a chance that running a simple private IRC server that's entirely separate from all your other infrastructure is useful. You'll need to make sure ahead of time that everyone who needs to access it urgently, when everything else is blowing up, will be able to.
So are you implying I’m some fool out of idiocricy? I don’t get your comment?
#freenode was generally the main IRC node I used with all the good dev rooms.
Seems to still be chugging along. You can even join directly via their web-client: https://freenode.net.
Personally I still use pidgin.im to connect to all the relevant #freenode goodness. Seems people forget it still works and is pretty great even all these years later :).
I forgot Freenode was still running, most projects left for https://libera.chat/
Due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_...
Thanks so much for the update. Had no idea. Seems all the main channels moved over. Thanks!
These are some of the most active channels:
https://netsplit.de/channels/?net=Libera.Chat
There are some other nets listed on that site with somewhat lower usercounts:
https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
Chaos Communication Congress has channels on Hackint network #39c3 #39c3-offtopic (both bridged to Matrix)
https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2025/39c3-power-cycles
I had the same question. I briefly joined the Slackware IRC a long, long time ago when I had questions, but now I wouldn't even know what to do with this client.
You find a community that shares the same interest as you and start chatting :)
I love Halloy and it inspired me to make more software in iced_rs, which is a fantastic simple to use UI framework. [0]
The project is even often cited as a good iced_rs code reference repo.
What I like about iced_rs over Qt is that you can write all your code in a single language in whichever style you like. As opposed to Qt which requires you learn an obtuse scripting language (qml) ontop of Cpp and locks performance improvements behind commercial license.
[0] https://iced.rs/
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