I often think that as a professional programmer, the majority of the time spent “coding” an application (for web or desktop) is simply finding the best way to do something. That may be getting a page to display the same in IE6 and chrome using universal CSS and without writing exceptions using never-official specifications for HTML, or it may be optimizing a query. Well, when official documentation fails me, I resort to IRC.
I’ve struggled for a while looking for the best client to use. I’ve sampled irssi, Pidgin, Empathy, XChat, xchat-gnome, along with a bunch of Qt clients. And Just to help out anyone, the ubuntu xchat package is the one to use. Ubuntu has an xchat-gnome package, but it’s not the same. XChat does everything, and does it well.