User:Lexein/HexChat

(Pending book or magazine reviews of HexChat, since it's now included on many Linux distros)

HexChat is an open source Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Client based on the popular, but now defunct, XChat client. HexChat is free for both Windows and Unix OS users. The latest stable release is version 2.9.5, which was released on April 1, 2013. Version 2.9.6 is being developed for a future release and is available for testing.

History
HexChat started its life in 2009 as freakschat, a maintenance branch of the XChat source-code that only provided Windows builds. In 2010 freakschat was superseded by XChat-WDK. The first release of XChat-WDK was in March 2010 with build 1409. In July 2012 the client was re-branded to HexChat and the development portal moved to GitHub. With the rebranding came a larger focus on new features and supporting platforms other than Windows.

Features
The current version of HexChat includes the following features:
 * Customizable interface with Theme support
 * Cross-platform on Windows and Unix-like OSes
 * Highly scriptable with Python, Perl, and JavaScript
 * Translated in multiple languages
 * Fully open source and actively developed
 * Multi-network with auto-connect, join, and identify
 * Spellcheck, Proxies, SASL, DCC support and more



Addons
HexChat ships with a handful of useful plugins that extend the functionality of the client. These plugins are:
 * Do At
 * Exec
 * FISHLiM
 * Update Checker
 * Sysinfo
 * Checksum
 * Winamp

Reception
In a brief review on IRCreviews.com, Hexchat was described as "a very full-featured IRC program, and includes 64-bit support, Lua scripting, non-admin install, localization and spelling support, and more."