IRCv3 drops six abandoned clients from its support tables
Updated August 9, 2026
On 7 August 2026 the IRCv3 support tables lost six clients in one commit, under the heading "remove clients which are marked as unmaintained or have not had commits in 5+ years". Each removal came with its reason attached:
- HexChat — development has formally ended; a fork remains in the table
- LimeChat — no commits in five years, website gone for months
- IceChat — no commits in three years, and its own site says it is no longer developed
- Colloquy — no commits in five years, no app update in eight
- Ambassador — no commits in six years, no maintainer
- Moon Moon — last commit six years ago, last release ten
None of this is news in the sense of new. What makes it worth noting is where it happened. These tables are the reference people check when picking a client or implementing a spec, and a project sitting in them reads as a live option. Six entries that had quietly stopped being live options are now simply gone.
For readers here the list mostly confirms what we have already covered — HexChat ended in February 2024 and has since been dropped from Debian testing; LimeChat has been coasting for years on macOS, where Textual's sunset already thinned the field considerably.
The practical effect is on the next person who searches for a client, lands on a listicle from 2019, and goes looking for confirmation. They will no longer find it here.
Where to go instead, per platform, is in best IRC clients in 2026.
See it: the IRCv3 client support tables.