Switching from Xchat to HexChat

As polynomial-c announced last year, xchat upstream is dead for some time now. Fortunately for us the fork hexchat is taking over and is compatible with your current xchat configuration so it's really easy to migrate.

migrating to hexchat

$ mv .xchat2/ .config/hexchat/ $ mv .config/hexchat/xchat.conf .config/hexchat/hexchat.conf

As mentioned in the comments by Louis Tim Larsen, if you have some servers configured with more than one channel make sure to run this command as well :

sed -i 's/,#/\nJ=#/g' ~/.config/hexchat/servlist.conf

Then run hexchat as you would xchat.

theme your IRC

If like me you're a fan of Solarized, you can get hexchat to use these colors thanks to some contributed themes. Here's the quick hack to have it done, for the Solarized Light theme.

$ cd .config/hexchat $ wget http://dl.hexchat.org/themes/Solarized%20Light.hct $ unzip -o Solarized\ Light.hct

Restart hexchat and enjoy your up to date and colorized IRC client.