Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client

I started working on Halloy back in 2022, with the goal of giving something back to the community I’ve been a part of for the past two decades. I wanted to create a modern, multi-platform IRC client written in Rust.

Three years later, I’ve made new friends who have become core contributors, and there are now over 200 people idling in our #halloy channel on Libera.

My hope is that this client will outlive me and that IRC will live on.

github.com

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371 points

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culinary-robot

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3 days ago

100 comments

ClawsOnPaws ・ 3 days ago

I'd love to test this, however it seems to not be accessible with screen readers. I assume this is because of the GUI library not supporting accessibility. I found an open issue about this on the Iced GitHub where in 2024 it was mentioned that the version after next should support it, and the last comment was in february of this year (https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/552)

I bookmarked this so hopefully once that effort gets further along I can give it a try!

I figured I'd leave this comment so that some folks can see that there are real people even on HN who require these features and that accessibility work is always appreciated. We definitely exist :)

  • nicoburns ・ 3 days ago

    Iced also has a roadmap: https://whimsical.com/roadmap-iced-7vhq6R35Lp3TmYH4WeYwLM

    Screen reader accessibility is at least on it, although not until the release after next.

    • ClawsOnPaws ・ 3 days ago

      Heh, that roadmap is also not accessible to screen readers, at least on FireFox. That's unfortunate. But I understand it's a big undertaking with little reward for most people. I do think there are UI libraries with AccessKit integration, egui I believe?

      Ah well. I'll check back on it every now and then either way.

      • sudahtigabulan ・ 2 days ago

        > that roadmap is also not accessible to screen readers

        It also has terrible navigation on mobile, even for sighted users. I gave up after a few seconds of trying to use it.

Daunk ・ 3 days ago

I've tried to use this, but I'm on multiple servers with tons of channels, and it gets a bit unwieldy without tabs. I also can't get it to minimize to tray, and having to "keep it open" at all times is somewhat annoying. I'll stick with Quassel for now.

Really impressive work though, you should be proud!

  • thek3nger ・ 3 days ago

    I added this configuration to make it works more tab-like.

        [actions.sidebar]
    buffer = "replace-pane"
  • tcdent ・ 3 days ago

    What channels are still active? I connected to freenode for the first time in years a few months ago and it was a ghost town. Would love to get back into some programming/tech communities on IRC.

    • fuzzzerd ・ 3 days ago

      Freenode melted down a few years back, there was a lot of drama around what happened, but I don't think it's active anymore and if it is, it's probably not what you remember. The community splintered and moved to other hosts.

    • korse ・ 2 days ago

      Come to rizon. Start with #chat and branch out from there. Lurk moar.

  • johnny22 ・ 3 days ago

    tabs are the reason i abandoned my halloy experiment. I'm currently following the halloy issue.

  • mi100hael ・ 3 days ago

    Agreed on the tabs. Not sure what I'm supposed to do when I have more than 1-2 channels I want to view.

airstrike ・ 3 days ago

halloy is not only an awesome app but a fantastic example if you want to learn more about building GUI software with iced.

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

If you're interested in building a GUI app in Rust, I encourage you to go through the examples and showcase apps like halloy

and if you get stuck, can ask our chill and helpful community on Discord https://discord.gg/3xZJ65GAhd

  • rootlocus ・ 3 days ago

    Funny enough, having close to zero experience with Rust and wanting to build an iced-rs application with Claude Code, I asked it to search github for large projects using iced-rs to use as a reference and Halloy ones one of the top 3.

  • giancarlostoro ・ 3 days ago

    I was just looking at that; I've been wanting a nice GUI library for Rust but never found one I liked. A number of them were bindings to other GUI stacks. I might try Iced next time I'm poking around with Rust.

mattfrommars ・ 3 days ago

I've started to notice there are a lot more rust based desktop application appearing vs say Go based or Java. Most of these apps are cross platforms. My guess is they are trying to compete with Electron. There is Tauri runs on Rust.

Can someone please tell me what special about Rust? Say, why aren't desktop application popular based on say Python?

On tangent, ive seen a lot of terminal base application in typescript and go

  • WD-42 ・ 3 days ago

    I am currently writing a desktop application in Rust. It’s a jellyfin client for music.

    I think the main reason is that writing Rust is a joy that gives you confidence. This is important to me as I often have small amounts of time to work on it (new dad). With rust I can start implementing a small feature, as long as it compiles I can be reasonably sure it works. In Python I’d be wading through a sea of runtime errors and never quite sure I actually got it right.

    Cross platform is another good reason. UI library support is good. You have iced like this app, but also decent GTK bindings.

    No runtime needed makes distribution and packaging infinitely easier than Python.

    It’s a great language for writing desktop apps.

    • stavros ・ 3 days ago

      As a user, I agree, I really like downloading a single, small binary that is a full-fledged desktop app. Hell, I downloaded Halloy just because it wasn't Electron, and it looks really nice, too!

      • Imustaskforhelp ・ 3 days ago

        I feel like the same can be said for golang but rust just has a more pleasant way of sometimes doing things.

        some of the best ways to build gui's on golang might be gtk golang bindings imo. I haven't tried qt but gtk for linux should work.

        I have seen many apps also use golang as backend and flutter as frontend (warp android app wormhole or something and localsend both do this)

    • 20after4 ・ 3 days ago

      Good point about Python. Python is so hit or miss on every platform and it's kind of difficult to distribute any complex python app unless you distribute your own python build along with it. Otherwise you have multiple levels of dependency hell, unique to each platform.

  • culinary-robot ・ 3 days ago

    I have a background in macOS applications, back when it was Objective-C. I have always loved native apps. When i decided to start Halloy the goal was to create a native application for multiple platforms, and for that Rust is perfect.

  • Rendello ・ 3 days ago

    > Can someone please tell me what special about Rust?

    I think I've seen this topic pop up from time to time ;)

    For me personally, I've been replacing a lot of my Python programs with Rust. A lot of it isn't much harder to write, and things like sum types are sorely missed when I write Python or most non-Rust languages. And usually, if my Rust program is a lot more difficult to write, it's because I'm exploring an optimization that wouldn't be possible or worthwhile in Python. Having an application be native and compiled is a big plus for me. I plan to release a desktop app in Rust but it isn't at that stage yet.

  • 1718627440 ・ 3 days ago

    There I quite a lot of desktop apps in Python. But for example if you use Tkinter, it looks awful on Linux and if you choose Gtk, you need to build the python version on Windows manually in minGW or ship Cygwin.

    • gertop ・ 3 days ago

      That's more of a GTK problem than a python one. It sucks on all platforms that isn't Linux.

      In my experience apps using pyqt5/6 have a much nicer interface and cross platform experience.

      • 1718627440 ・ 3 days ago

        How does Qt help with that it isn't implemented in Python, so you need a binary, which is OS specific? GTK wasn't that hard either once I had figured out how MinGW works. All you essentially need is to setup a working C compiler for Windows. You don't even need to figure that out yourself, because all you need to do is to tell the MSYS2 package manager to install a python version, that has GTK support.

        In my opinion the problem is more that support for more Toolkits isn't built into Python so you essentially need to deal with another language as well, which sucks when you only know python.

        Distributing Python for Windows is even harder than for Linux.

  • righthand ・ 3 days ago

    Rust produces a single binary. Developers appreciate this when shipping an app. For Python based apps you usually need your user to have Python installed and then ship a bunch of Python files with interop to some non-Python UI library. So you probably need to ship the UI library as a dependency too.

    Or you can just build it in Rust and learn what .unwrap() does.

    • az09mugen ・ 3 days ago

      I don't say it is best, but there are solutions like pyinstaller [0] to produce a binary from python code.

      [0] https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/

      • righthand ・ 2 days ago

        This just obfuscates the issue not actually fixes it. This is 1 binary + all the previously mentioned files.

  • eikenberry ・ 3 days ago

    Given the other answers here focusing on the single binary as the main benefit, Go would seem the only competitor of those listed and Go lacks good support for GUIs. Most GUIs are written in C/C++ and Go doesn't have as good a story for C/C++ integration (community convention is to generally avoid it if at all possible). IMO as Zig matures you'll see it grow as a language for GUIs. You get the same cross platform support, single binary generation and C integration with better tooling and a language with a significantly lower cognitive load.

  • philipwhiuk ・ 2 days ago

    I can tell you that writing Java GUI applications is hell. You have the following libraries:

    AWT - still actually under-pining the others, but very ugly to work with

    Swing - basically runs on top of AWT, with the same design model, plays badly with it. Is hard to write in a testable way, is prone to embedding business logic in UI components

    JavaFX - all the worst parts of business Java with all the worst parts of XML and also the worst parts of a game engine. Now you need to care about 'adding a scene to a stage'.

    The principle core technology that made Java good was applets. Since they were killed by mobile, the reason for delivering a Java app is functionally zero. You will need to ship a JVM which you need to update alongside your app.

    Java is a great back-end development language and a really poor GUI language.

    These days you should either ship an Electron app or native code.

  • 20after4 ・ 3 days ago

    I can't speak to rust but I think the reason you see CLI tools and Servers written in GO is simply because that is where the language really shines. I don't think it would be very much fun to develop a desktop GUI app in GO.

    Go is kind of verbose and just a bit hostile towards fancy structural features and complex abstractions. I think rust is kind of the opposite of GO in a lot of ways, even though they theoretically should be targeting a lot of the same use-cases.

  • gertop ・ 3 days ago

    Funny how nobody has actually addressed your question, choosing to praise rust instead..

    The answer is that there are several python GUI applications (a dozen music players, Cura, Calibre, Anki, Deluge, etc). Hardly any Go because all bindings suck (which isn't that surprising, go devs are often hostile to cgo) and there's no (non toy) native toolkit either. I'd don't know why that is. Every few years I look for one but I give up and write the UI for my Go tool in html instead...

    • timeon ・ 2 days ago

      Just side-note: lot of non-GUI parts of Anki are now written in Rust and GUI is slowly moving to Svelte/TypeScript.

  • yoz-y ・ 3 days ago

    With Python I find that distribution is too much of a pain (I don’t mind creating a virtual env for a cli tool but for a GUI forget it). I love that go links everything statically and so far I haven’t had any problems running rust tools.

  • thyristan ・ 3 days ago

    There are no languages with good GUI frameworks except C, C++ and C#. All other bindings typically suck ass.

    • MangoToupe ・ 3 days ago

      And presumably C# is just binding to some native toolkit

      • PaulDavisThe1st ・ 3 days ago

        There is no native toolkit on Linux, at least not in the sense that there is on macOS or windows.

      • nobleach ・ 3 days ago

        If I had to simply bind to a native toolkit, I think Lazrus can do that. Having loved Delphi back in the day, I think I'd prefer to write ObjectPascal for anything more than a very simple utility. C# would likely be my second choice.

      • 0x457 ・ 3 days ago

        Yes, but C# is very nice as a language for GUI, can't explain it, just feels right.

  • gtirloni ・ 3 days ago

    Latency. Go and Java with optimizations can work just fine, Python not so much yet.

  • rtpg ・ 3 days ago

    I've tried writing GUIs with Python in the past and it was a bit tricky to get the pieces working.

    The one Python GUI that comes to mind that is also, like, not garbage looking is Anki.

  • MangoToupe ・ 3 days ago

    It just works, it can do most anything, and it binds well with C.

    • linhns ・ 3 days ago

      Also much easier to manage packages, which for me it’s the differentiating factor.

  • airstrike ・ 3 days ago

    Fast. Explicit. Safe. Cross-platform.

    Did I mention fast?

  • TheDong ・ 3 days ago

    Go and Java are actively hostile to integrating with C libraries, and the easiest way to make clean native UI on all 3 major OSs is to link with C libraries.

    There's also something akin to the Python Paradox here: https://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

    Rust is an interesting and intellectually stimulating language, it lets you use your brain to write clean and pretty code, and rewards you for making clean powerful abstractions.

    Java and Go are both anti-intellectual languages that reward you for turning off your brain and writing the most verbose awful code you can think of, and will leave anyone who has ever studied type-theory with a massive migraine for hours after each coding session (go moreso than java).

    I think those two factors, C bindings, and whether they respect the programmer's intelligence, are the main reason.

lksaar ・ 3 days ago

Used to use Hexchat and swapped to halloy more than a year ago and couldn't be happier. The development is coming along nicely and a lot of modern features got added since I've been using it. It's a joy to use in conjunction with soju and my irc experience hasn't been this smooth in a long time.

dysoco ・ 3 days ago

I haven't used IRC in years, but my teenage of ~12 years ago would've been stoked by this, it's the nicest client I've seen as of yet. Cheers!

ryanmerket ・ 3 days ago

Nice! I'll give it whirl. For those with terrible eyesight, do you offer accessibility options?

EFNet for life!

  • emersion ・ 3 days ago

    AFAIU not yet because the underlying GUI framework doesn't support this, but the developer mentioned they'd definitely be interested in adding it.

keyle ・ 3 days ago

I use it, it's really good and getting better every release.

It's fast and robust. The toml config is also straight forward.

Highly recommended!

PS: I preferred the old (bird) icon

macmac ・ 3 days ago

I use Halloy on a daily basis and could not be happier. It is super smooth in use and highly configurable using the config file. Halloy is also a great show case for the iced GUI framework and Rust for desktop apps.

Insanity ・ 3 days ago

Reminds me I haven't logged in to IRC in.. maybe 2-3 years now. It just kind of fizzled out as the main groups of people I interact with moved to Discord. But I kind of miss IRC.

cassepipe ・ 3 days ago

I love the general design of Halloy and I have submitted it to HN at least two times. Glad to see it on the front page ! Keep up the good work

slacktivism123 ・ 3 days ago

Thank you.

Halloy is a wonderfully configurable replacement for beloved Mac IRC client Textual, whose development has sadly wound down (now officially, as of last month).

I hope it continues to grow in popularity while keeping performance and privacy at the core.

mobeigi ・ 3 days ago

I'm amazed people still use IRC! More power to you. I used to use it a fair bit back in the day bit the last programming community that I was a part of that used IRC moved to Discord around 2020 which is when I basically stopped using it.

righthand ・ 3 days ago

I love Halloy and it inspired me to make more software in iced_rs, which is a fantastic simple to use UI framework. [0]

The project is even often cited as a good iced_rs code reference repo.

What I like about iced_rs over Qt is that you can write all your code in a single language in whichever style you like. As opposed to Qt which requires you learn an obtuse scripting language (qml) ontop of Cpp and locks performance improvements behind commercial license.

[0] https://iced.rs/

crtasm ・ 3 days ago

Can it show channel modes next to the #channel_name and my nick+user mode next to the input field? Two things I find very useful in weechat and couldn't work out how to do in Halloy last time I tried it out.

Thanks for making a client.

  • culinary-robot ・ 3 days ago

    if you type /mode it should show the mode next to the channel name. this should happen automatically - will look into that. i'll also add the nick-user mode next to the input field. a few has requested it.

    • crtasm ・ 3 days ago

      Thanks! Having both always visible would be ideal for me.

BoredPositron ・ 3 days ago

I switched to it some months ago and couldn't be happier. Was a die hard irssi user before but there are some parts of halloy that are just really convenient. Maybe I am getting older.

ComputerGuru ・ 3 days ago

Wow, I used this when you first posted a public link to it and I see it’s come a long way since; I should definitely check it out again! Congrats on the success thus far!

ochronus ・ 3 days ago

It's my go-to client. Kudos and thanks for developing it!

Vaslo ・ 3 days ago

Not sure if this question will get removed but a tangent nonetheless - I’d like to use this but I don’t know what to do with it since the advent of Discord. What do people do with IRC now and where do you find content?

I remember being a high school student and having an amazing physics conversation on IRC that included a description of Flatworld that really fascinated me.

  • neilv ・ 3 days ago

    > I’d like to use this but I don’t know what to do with it since the advent of Discord. What do people do with IRC now and where do you find content?

    IRC is for people to whom the word "content" sounds right out of Idiocracy. :)

    I wouldn't go poking around IRC today looking for random passive content consumption. There's more of that pretty much everywhere else on the Internet.

    Go to IRC, in a goal-directed way, if an open source project you use is OG enough to have an IRC channel (rather than a open source backsliding Discord) that you want to access.

    If you're involved in IT incident response for a company, there is a chance that running a simple private IRC server that's entirely separate from all your other infrastructure is useful. You'll need to make sure ahead of time that everyone who needs to access it urgently, when everything else is blowing up, will be able to.

    • Vaslo ・ 3 days ago

      So are you implying I’m some fool out of idiocricy? I don’t get your comment?

      • neilv ・ 3 days ago

        It's a very common term now, and no fault of anyone for using it.

        But it was introduced in its current sense (not in the protocol sense) by cynical and greedy exploiters, who spoiled much of the goodness of the Internet.

        So when a random person casually says something like "consume content", unironically, it's like saying, "it's got what plants crave...".

  • asnyder ・ 3 days ago

    #freenode was generally the main IRC node I used with all the good dev rooms.

    Seems to still be chugging along. You can even join directly via their web-client: https://freenode.net.

    Personally I still use pidgin.im to connect to all the relevant #freenode goodness. Seems people forget it still works and is pretty great even all these years later :).

  • trevithick ・ 3 days ago

    I had the same question. I briefly joined the Slackware IRC a long, long time ago when I had questions, but now I wouldn't even know what to do with this client.

    • culinary-robot ・ 3 days ago

      You find a community that shares the same interest as you and start chatting :)

gompertz ・ 2 days ago

This looks amazing. Based on the animated gif, I cant believe how better IRC looks with the text properly indented and separated from the username. Way less visual load!

SomeUserName432 ・ 3 days ago

I can't at the top of my head remember all the minor annoyances I ran into when I tried Halloy, but things like not being able to paste a large message because "it exceeds the single message limit" was a real dealbreaker.

I ended up going for Crossover and mIRC

  • goku12 ・ 3 days ago

    Please file bug reports or feature requests when you find them, if they haven't been filed already. Don't just leave silently. And not just for halloy, but for all FOSS projects in general. The developers/maintainers can choose what to do with them - but they'll at least be aware of the pain points. That too is a contribution to the projects that we use for free.

    PS: This assumes that you haven't done so. But even if you did, please leave it as a request to everyone else.

sammnaser ・ 3 days ago

Awesome! Been running an IRC server and looking for a decent native client, the ecosystem seems to have frozen around the first Bush presidency so will definitely be trying this out.

nullwarp ・ 3 days ago

Actually surprised I never stumbled on this while I was looking for an IRC client. I ended up on on The Lounge for a while and that's always been pretty good.

Will give this a go because I would always prefer a native client in the first place and this looks excellent!

fullstop ・ 3 days ago

Hey, this looks pretty cool and it is very snappy compared to, say, Konversation. It would be fantastic if there was a way to add AppIndicator support and allow the main window to be closed.

khimaros ・ 3 days ago

i've been very happy with the combination of senpai on my laptop, goguna on Android, and soju on a cloud instance for persistence. i will try this as an alternative laptop frontend.

nakamoto_damacy ・ 3 days ago

Excellent. I never liked mIRC, and for me the terminal was the best interface. But this looks good. I also still use vi. Never made the mental leap to vim. Old habits die hard.

Arch-TK ・ 2 days ago

Is this why a bunch of people joined random Libera channels yesterday wondering why IRC is so great if nobody ever talks?

udev4096 ・ 3 days ago

Looks really great. But I am gonna stick to weechat :)

denvermullets ・ 3 days ago

ive been using halloy for almost a year(?) and i really dig it. you and the contributors should be proud.

i dont hang out in #halloy but maybe i should!

INTPenis ・ 3 days ago

I'm sure Timo thought the same about irssi.

palata ・ 3 days ago

Wow, that's really cool! I just adopted it :)

deadbabe ・ 3 days ago

The fact this is written in rust alone means it will be an instant install for me even though I don’t really use IRC :/

nmz ・ 3 days ago

Why is this "modern"?

  • donio ・ 3 days ago

    The extensive IRCv3 support for one thing. chathistory support in particular is a big one for me since we rely on it on my personal server.

    If you scroll down to the Features section on the linked page that gives a good overview.

    • guerby ・ 2 days ago

      Hi, I'm used to save locally chat history of channels I'm listening to.

      In hexchat GUI client chat history is locally found in a simple text file, one line per message in .config/hexchat/logs/irc.libera.chat/xxx.log

      However I've found no option to create such a log with halloy, am I missing something in the documentation?