Why IzzyIRC exists.

macOS has never really had an IRC client for people who wanted to script, automate, and customize their way through it. Mac users who wanted that either ran Windows software under emulation, settled for a bare-bones client, or left IRC for something else.

IzzyIRC is built to be that client, finally — native, fast, and honest about what IRC actually is: a text protocol you can bend to exactly what you need. It's a from-scratch Swift/SwiftUI application for macOS 14 and later, not an Electron wrapper, not a Wine bottle, not a cross-platform toolkit running in a compatibility layer.

IRC isn't a growth market, and this isn't a pitch about reinventing chat. It's for people who never left IRC, or who are coming back on purpose: long-time users who switched to a Mac and miss real scripting and DCC, open-source and dev-tool communities still running on networks like Libera.Chat and OFTC, sysadmins who want a scriptable client for watching channels, and scripting hobbyists who write for the love of the language itself.

IzzyIRC is a solo project, built and maintained in spare time, aiming for functional parity with the classic, script-driven clients that power users on other platforms have relied on for decades — full multi-server IRC, DCC, a complete scripting language, and the switchbar/treebar-style UI conventions that made those clients work.