mIRC in 2026: the Windows classic, thirty years on

If you used IRC in the late 1990s, you used mIRC — its connect dialog and beep are core internet nostalgia. Less known: Khaled Mardam-Bey has kept updating it continuously since 1995, making mIRC one of the longest-maintained desktop applications in existence. Windows-only, shareware, and very much alive.

What it is today #

Modern mIRC supports what a current client must: TLS, SASL, IRCv3 capabilities including server-time, IPv6, Unicode. The interface remains its own genre — MDI windows inside a parent window, a 90s convention mIRC has politely declined to abandon — but everything configurable is configurable, down to fonts, colors and event sounds per channel.

The license: shareware with a 30-day evaluation and a one-time registration fee. The nag screen is famously gentle, which is why half the internet remembers "evaluating" mIRC for a decade. Paying for thirty years of maintenance is, in fairness, a reasonable ask.

mSL: the scripting language that built a culture #

mIRC's defining feature is its scripting language. mSL scripts ran trivia games, file servers, channel protection, ASCII art, full applications — for a generation of users, editing remote.ini was a first programming experience. A taste:

on *:TEXT:!hello:#: { msg $chan Hello $nick! }

That culture produced thousands of scripts (and, inevitably, the 90s ecosystem of script-kiddie "war scripts"). The archives are still out there, and the language still works — muscle memory from 1999 transfers directly to 2026.

Honest assessment: who should pick mIRC now #

Choose mIRC if you are on Windows and want either the nostalgia done properly or the scripting environment — nothing else makes channel automation this immediate for a non-programmer. It remains a completely competent daily client: connect to Libera.Chat with SASL ticked in the connect dialog, join your channels, done.

Choose differently if you want free and open source (HexChat), cross-platform modern (Halloy), or terminal (WeeChat, Irssi).

Setup notes for returners #

Three things changed since you last ran it: use TLS (+6697 ports — the + prefix means SSL in mIRC's server syntax), set SASL under the server's login method instead of perform-on-connect NickServ lines, and your old network is probably not where you left it. Your scripts folder, though — that still loads.