Cascade Chat – A Hackable IRCv3 Client for macOS, Windows, and Linux
Hello HN! I'm Matt and today I'd like to show you Cascade Chat. One of my earliest internet experiences was with mIRC. I always admired its straightforward, pleasant UI and the way it wove a hackable core into the code. The way you could build on the visual and API layers of the underlying IRC client to me was fascinating software machinery. It was truly a client that you could build on top of. As my career has progressed, I moved away from Windows and adopted Linux as my daily driver. That was where I found HexChat, the closest thing I could find to mIRC many years later. While I really…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello HN! I'm Matt and today I'd like to show you Cascade Chat. One of my earliest internet experiences was with mIRC. I always admired its straightforward, pleasant UI and the way it wove a hackable core into the code. The way you could build on the visual and API layers of the underlying IRC client to me was fascinating software machinery. It was truly a client that you could build on top of. As my career has progressed, I moved away from Windows and adopted Linux as my daily driver. That was where I found HexChat, the closest thing I could find to mIRC many years later. While I really enjoyed HexChat, it wasn't quite what mIRC offered. I eventually found myself on macOS with no clear analogue to either. That's why I built Cascade Chat. Cascade is a modern IRCv3 client. It supports persistent local history with full-text search, network management, replies, typing indicators, link previews, pinned messages, native notifications, SASL authentication, server-time, chathistory, account and away tracking, and the ratified IRCv3 capability set. I also wanted Cascade to be hackable, so I built in two fundamentally different layers: - Scripting powered by Go scripts for personal automation, event handlers, and timers. Scripts run in-process with no access to the standard library, filesystem, or network. - Plugins that communicate over JSON-RPC and can be written in any language as external processes. Stack-wise, it's a Go application built on top of Wails v3, which leverages the OS's native WebView to render modern web tech frontends as desktop applications. The result is an Electron-like experience without packaging a separate Chromium runtime. Full disclosure, since this is HN: I built Cascade using agentic engineering. I made the product and UX decisions, designed the architecture and code interfaces, and I reviewed and dogfooded the resulting work. Coding agents implemented much of the space between those decisions. To further ensure consistent quality, I built gates around that process rather than treating generated code as finished. I focused on unit and integration tests, full-stack end-to-end tests against a real IRCv3 server (Ergo), automated release candidates, and regular dogfooding of the prerelease channel. Cascade is open source under the BSD 3-Clause license. Prebuilt packages are available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The current builds are unsigned, so macOS and Windows require a first-run confirmation step that I've documented in the README. I'd love to know if you'd make Cascade your daily IRC client, and if not, what that'd take! Feedback and PRs welcome.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- ILIRC like chat platform with 4chan like reply system2020 · ▲14
Hello HN, I want to share something that I worked on for quite a while as my side project - www.heahy.com an IRC like chat where you can share various media and even record yourself (using web MediaRecorder api). Here is a thread with short explanation on how it works: https://www.heahy.com/channel/homepage/thread/3900adb9e441a09abc757461 I am looking for any feedback and if you have any ideas, advice or questions I am eager to hear it here or on heahy!
- ICIRC.com – A Scriptable Web IRC Client2025 · irc.com · ▲5
Hi HN, Long-time IRC obsessive here (some of you may remember me from the privacy wars and the freenode drama). My commitment to the protocol never died, so I built IRC.com, a browser-based IRC client where everything lives in user-editable JavaScript. The core ships with just a protocol shim and window manager; the rest is scriptable. Out of the box it feels like a normal IRC client, but if you want to automate channel ops, invent new commands, or redesign the UI, the power is yours. I’d love your feedback, bug reports, and feature ideas... especially from fellow IRC lifers! I'll be adding…
- AOAn open source IRC client for your web browser2013 · github.com · ▲44
- MWmy weekend project, Vidless. "CloudApp" for video chat.2012 · vidless.com · ▲16
I always find myself frustrated by how many steps I have to take to video chat with someone online. There's always too much software to download and install, and too many accounts to remember. The high-end, high-price Cisco conferencing systems I've used are especially fragile. So I built Vidless in a weekend for myself, and I hope you find it useful too. Just create a room and share the link, and you'll be chatting in seconds. You can invite several people (I haven't really tested a max yet), and chats on Vidless are always private. Enjoy!
- NPNew project for on-demand chat rooms2014 · urshoutbox.com · ▲37
I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
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