I'm not hanging around on IRC a lot these days, but when I do I used hexchat (and xchat before). Probably a bad habbit of clinging to what I got used to for the past 25 years. But in the light of the planned removal of GTK2, it felt like it was time to look for an alternative.

Halloy looked interesting, albeit not packaged for Debian. But upstream references a flatpak (another party I did not join so far), good enough to give it a try.

$ sudo apt install flatpak
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
$ flatpak install org.squidowl.halloy
$ flatpak run org.squidowl.halloy

Configuration ends up at ~/.var/app/org.squidowl.halloy/config/halloy/config.toml, which I linked for convenience to ~/.halloy.toml.

Since I connect via ZNC in an odd old setup without those virtual networks, but several accounts, and of course never bothered to replace the self signed certificate, it requires some additional configuration to be able to connect. Each account gets its own servers.<foo> block like this:

[servers.bnc-oftc]
nickname = "my-znc-user-for-this-network"
server = "sven.stormbind.net"
dangerously_accept_invalid_certs = true
password = "mypasssowrd"
port = 4711
use_tls = true

Halloy has also a small ZNC guide.

I'm growing old, so a bigger font size is useful. Be aware that font changes require an application restart to take effect.

[font]
size = 16
family = "Noto Mono"

I also prefer the single-pane mode which could be copy & pasted as documented.

Works good enough for now. hexchat was also the last none wayland application I've been using (xlsclients output is finally empty).