Unregistered users of mIRC will probably be aware that the more recent updates are far less permissive towards freeloaders these days, and now often requires you to close and restart several times before it will allow you past the nag screen. So I have had a look at the alternatives.

Chatzilla is one client I've used on and off for years, but it has always had a few user-unfriendly hindrances from its browser heritage, particularly the annoying way that the channel window and other parts of the interface can have focus like a page element, so when you type something after clicking on the application window, the text won't necessarily go to the input box. Multiply this by a few dozen times a day, everyday, it's a major annoyance. Also it doesn't have much in the way of a network list like mIRC does.

HydraIRC was promising a long time ago, but became closed source, and hasn't had an update in three years, even for security patching.

For Windows users there hasn't been a lot else, the XChat port for Windows was made commercial quite some time ago, which was over complaints that it was a violation of the GPL. There was a fork called Silverx but that had a major annoyance; every time you hit the backspace key in an empty input box, there would be a loud and grating bell sound, and as this was embedded into the build of the GTK dependencies that are packaged with it, there was no way to fix it without resorting to an obscure hack.

So I am at last very happy to announce I have found a much nicer solution. Another XChat fork is available, called XChat WDK and does not come with the annoyances of the Silverx build, plus it has many more features, the best of which is the optional spelling dictionary that is a separate download. The WDK wiki has a helpful comparison table of the differences between the various builds of XChat: http://code.google.com/p/xchat-wdk/wiki/InfoComparison

So at last we can get rid of mIRC forever!