Textual, the Mac’s best IRC client for the better part of a decade, has been sunset. bIRC is one developer’s answer — a client built from Apple frameworks alone, that speaks the modern extensions IRC has quietly been growing all this time.

IRC has a reputation as a fossil, which undersells what has happened to it. The IRCv3 working group has spent years bolting the things people expect from a chat app onto a protocol from 1988, and bIRC implements a genuinely wide slice of them: message tags, server-time, batches, reactions, replies, typing indicators, read markers, message redaction, and multiline messages. The one that changes daily use most is CHATHISTORY — reconnect and the client asks the server for what it missed, rather than dropping you into a conversation already in progress.

The native part is not a marketing line either. Real windows and toolbars, split views, semantic colors that follow the system appearance, system notifications. Fredrik Blank built it with no third-party dependencies at all, which is an unusual choice in 2026 and the stated reason he can keep the codebase small enough to vouch for.

The security surface is more thought-through than the category norm. TLS with CertFP client certificates and SASL cover authentication; SOCKS5 and HTTP-CONNECT proxies do remote DNS, so your lookups don’t leak the networks you’re on. It works with bouncers — ZNC, soju and others — replaying stored history on reconnect. DCC is there too, with passive mode, resume, and automatic port mapping through the router, which is more care than most clients still give a feature this old.

Two honest caveats. It is not open source: the developer says he may open it up later but, as a sole developer with this as a side project, he doesn’t want to take on pull requests he can’t service — a straight answer, and worth knowing before you build a workflow on the sandboxed JavaScript automation API. And it needs macOS 14.6 or later. It is free, currently at 1.1.4, and on the Mac App Store.