HexChat

» see hexchat.github.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Chat where I grew up online meant MSN, and if you were on IRC at all you were on mIRC, the shareware client with the nag screen that everyone ignored for years. HexChat belongs to the other half of that world, the free software half, and it also arrived late: 2010, by which time the argument about where people would talk to each other had been settled somewhere else entirely.

It still mattered, because of what it replaced. XChat, written by Peter Zelezny in 1998, was open source, but the official Windows build had become a paid download. So people made free Windows builds of the same code, and one of those, XChat-WDK, grew into its own project. On 6 July 2012 it took the name HexChat, went cross platform, and started shipping actual new work instead of patches.

From there it did the least glamorous job in software for twelve years. It was the thing in the applications menu when you installed Linux, the client the wiki told a new contributor to download, the window that sat open on a second monitor in an office where the team's channel was still on IRC.

~ the record ~

~ where it came from ~

IRC clients are a strange category because the protocol barely changes and the work is all in the edges. HexChat's value was in the accumulated small things: sane defaults for a dozen networks, scripting in Python and Perl, spell checking, a tab layout that could hold forty channels without becoming unusable, a Windows installer that just worked for people who had never compiled anything.

None of that is exciting and all of it takes maintenance. GTK moved under it. Windows changed its build story twice. Networks added SASL and then TLS requirements. Every one of those is an unpaid weekend for someone.

~ the maintainer problem ~

Version 2.16.1 landed in 2021 with a note attached asking for help, saying the project needed people. Nobody came, and the honest reading of the final announcement is that HexChat had been effectively unmaintained for years before anyone said so out loud. 2.16.2 on 9 February 2024 was a small bugfix release published specifically so the last thing users got would not be broken, and then the project called it.

There is no acquisition in this grave, no shutdown notice, no company. The code is still on GitHub under a license that lets anyone continue it, and a fork picked it up. What ended was the promise that someone was watching. That promise is the actual product in free software, and it is the part that cannot be forked.

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