ZUSE – The Modern IRC Chat for the Terminal Made in Go/Bubbletea

57•babycommando•8h ago

Comments

GCUMstlyHarmls•7h ago

I know its built on pretty large abstractions, but I think its impressive to get an entire IRC TUI client out of ~1k lines with comments & formatting.

babycommando•7h ago

Thanks!! I'm going to improve the readability to enable contributions. Hope you liked ::)

DigiEggz•7h ago

Excited to check this out! Nice work!

babycommando•5h ago

Thank you! ::)

sho_hn•6h ago

Something tells me you might enjoy this:

https://www.printables.com/model/1251667-mechanical-nand-uni...

babycommando•5h ago

Absolutely lovely!!

alberth•6h ago

Unsolicited feedback, can the IRC screenshots have more contrast (and also not show such a vibrant distracting background).

The combination of those two make it difficult to even see what you’ve made.

babycommando•1h ago

Someone get this man an oled screen! Jokes apart, thanks for the tips!

alrs•5h ago

"Modern" is the most passive-aggressive adjective in the history of HN.

babycommando•5h ago

long live hexchat!!

snvzz•4h ago

long live amIRC[0]!

0. https://www.amirc.org/

anonym29•5h ago

To be clear, you still can't click, drag, and highlight text for basic operations like quickly and easily copying some text in any Bubbletea/Lipgloss interfaces, right?

Unless that has changed, that dynamic places this behind most other CLI-based IRC clients, including some that are decades old.

babycommando•5h ago

Thats neat actually, will take a look into how viable it can be. Bubbletea (and lipgloss) are like CSS for the terminal, you do the styling, calculate margins, manage responsive things wich is quite cool already. I believe what you mean is totally doable, just that I'm not much of a mouse user myself - it slows me down. Thanks for the feedback.

anonym29•4h ago

For what it's worth, I rarely do use the mouse in my terminal, but on those few occasions when I do want to, Bubbletea/Lipgloss applications have had a history of being pretty infuriating for me as a user.

P.S. Keep up the great work! The world needs more IRC.

wredcoll•4h ago

How is this separate from what a terminal normally provides?

yoz-y•3h ago

Wait, how can you not copy paste from a terminal application?

Or is this about to have break-line aware copy in panes (such as in tmux)?

boredemployee•4h ago

tangential question: are there still any IRC servers and (small) channels with cool people? I recently lost a virtual friend I had talked to for over 20 years, all thanks to some random mIRC channel back in the day. he ran the server with a bunch of ppl for so long. so sad. i really miss the times when we could have fun with just plain text.

babycommando•4h ago

ZUSE was initially made to go along a CLI I've built for a synthwave radio NightrideFM (https://nightride.fm/), that has a hacker subchannel named Rekt Network (https://rekt.fm/). Both communities are still very active there!

irc.rekt.network:6697 channels: #rekt,#nightride TLS true

Also checkout the Nightride cli at https://github.com/babycommando/nightride-cli

lmm•4h ago

No. Text-first chat is great, but the people who stuck to IRC this long are all sysadmin-luddites or otherwise deeply weird.

benreesman•2h ago

I hang out on IRC. Its not active like back in the day but a lot of OG legends lurk and a couple of times a day you can help someone switch to Linux if you have time. I have a TODO to get more serious about finding active channels.

pabs3•1h ago

There are lots of IRC servers still running, both big and small, some of them are listed here:

https://netsplit.de/

iJohnDoe•4h ago

Impressive. Will give it a try.

jcastro•4h ago

Would love to see this for matrix!

babycommando•3h ago

Good idea!

emersion•2h ago

Similar (but more mature) client : https://sr.ht/~delthas/senpai/

babycommando•56m ago

oh there is a wide range of IRC clients for the terminal indeed. The project here was to implement bubbletea/lipgloss. Its like CSS for terminal UIs! Check it out when you can, pretty neat visuals.

mariusor•1h ago

I don't understand projects like these. Open source is mainly driven by people that want to do something with computers that's not yet possible so they write some code to help them.

However TUI IRC clients already exist in the form of venerable weechat, and all the other examples people already gave in the thread.

So I ask what is the purpose? Learning? Sure I can see that, but why is a project with 5 commits being presented on HN as some kind of innovative application? Trustworthy projects need tenure and they need humility. This is neither of those.

ClueslessTech99•18m ago

Does it support IRCv3?

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ZUSE – The Modern IRC Chat for the Terminal Made in Go/Bubbletea

Comments

Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUDs

Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork

The Meeting Culture

SIMD Within a Register: How I Doubled Hash Table Lookup Performance

Dumb Pipe

Blender: Beyond Mouse and Keyboard

How I fixed my blog's performance issues by writing a new Jekyll plugin

Multiplex: Command-Line Process Mutliplexer

I hacked my washing machine

Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google

Making Postgres slower

Claude Code Router

ZUSE – The Modern IRC Chat for the Terminal Made in Go/Bubbletea

Formal specs as sets of behaviors

Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

Solid protocol restores digital agency

Why I write recursive descent parsers, despite their issues (2020)

The JJ VCS workshop: A zero-to-hero speedrun

“Tivoization” and your right to install under Copyleft and GPL (2021)

VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

IBM Keyboard Patents

Digitising CDs (a.k.a. using your phone as an image scanner)

Fourble turns lists of MP3 files hosted anywhere into podcasts

Designing a flatpack bed

How big can I print my image?

Bits 0x02: switching to orion as a browser

Hello Sprout

Tom Lehrer has died