Halloy 2026.8 released — channel monitor, in-app config editor, keyring support

Halloy shipped 2026.8 on 26 July, two months after 2026.7, and it is a bigger release than the version number suggests.

The headline additions:

• Channel Monitor — one buffer showing messages from every joined channel. The thing terminal users have built out of scripts for twenty years, now built in.
• Config editor — edit config.toml inside the app rather than alt-tabbing to a text editor, with undo/redo.
• System keyring support for server, NickServ, channel, SASL, filehost and proxy passwords. Credentials come out of the plain-text config, which is the single best security change the app could have made.
• Undo/redo in the message input (ctrl/cmd+z), which a surprising number of chat clients still lack.
• Sidebar work — collapse and expand servers, mute individual channels and queries, and highlight indicators are now configured independently of unread indicators.

On the protocol side it picks up IRCv3 no-implicit-names, and adds a do_not_request setting so you can stop the client asking for specific capabilities — useful when a server handles one of them badly.

Halloy remains the recommendation for a modern graphical client on Windows, macOS and Linux, and this release does not change that; it just removes several reasons to keep a text editor open beside it.

Download: halloy.chat — full notes in the 2026.8 release.