WeeChat

Not to be confused with WeChat.

WeeChat (Wee Enhanced Environment for Chat) is a free and open-source Internet Relay Chat client that is designed to be light and fast. It is released under the terms of the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later and has been developed since 2003.

WeeChat
WeeChat 3.4 with the default configuration
Developer	Sébastien Helleu
Initial release	June 26, 2003; 22 years ago (2003-06-26)
Stable release	4.7.1  / 16 August 2025
Repository	github.com/weechat/weechat
Written in	C
Operating system	Linux, BSD, OS X, GNU Hurd, Microsoft Windows (using Cygwin)
Size	17.2 MB
Available in	14 languages[1]
Type	IRC client
License	GPL-3.0-or-later
Website	weechat.org

WeeChat comes with a default ncurses interface, and it is possible to use other interfaces (e.g. Glowing Bear,^[2] a web frontend) through the use of the relay plugin.^[3]

Features

WeeChat's features include:^[4]

• IPv6
• SSL
• Proxy connections
• The screen can be split up to display multiple windows at the same time.
• Incremental text search
• Aspell support for spell checking
• Scripting support for many languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Tcl, Scheme with GNU Guile, JavaScript with V8 (JavaScript engine), PHP)
• FIFO pipes for remote control
• Support for multiple character encodings
• User-defined aliases and shortkeys

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).^[5]

Binary packages and builds of WeeChat are available for installation as well as the source code for self compilation.^[6] This includes most Linux distributions and BSD package management systems, such as Debian,^[7] Ubuntu,^[8] Mandriva Linux,^[9] Fedora,^[10] Gentoo Linux,^[11] Arch Linux,^[12] FreeBSD via the FreeBSD Ports system, OpenBSD via the Ports collection, as well on NetBSD via Pkgsrc.^[13]

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.^[14]

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients
• List of Internet Relay Chat commands
• irssi