ZUSE – The Modern IRC Chat for the Terminal Made in Go/Bubbletea
22 comments
·July 27, 2025sho_hn
Something tells me you might enjoy this:
https://www.printables.com/model/1251667-mechanical-nand-uni...
babycommando
Absolutely lovely!!
GCUMstlyHarmls
I know its built on pretty large abstractions, but I think its impressive to get an entire IRC TUI client out of ~1k lines with comments & formatting.
babycommando
Thanks!! I'm going to improve the readability to enable contributions. Hope you liked ::)
boredemployee
tangential question: are there still any IRC servers and (small) channels with cool people? I recently lost a virtual friend I had talked to for over 20 years, all thanks to some random mIRC channel back in the day. he ran the server with a bunch of ppl for so long. so sad. i really miss the times when we could have fun with just plain text.
babycommando
ZUSE was initially made to go along a CLI I've built for a synthwave radio NightrideFM (https://nightride.fm/), that has a hacker subchannel named Rekt Network (https://rekt.fm/). Both communities are still very active there!
irc.rekt.network:6697 channels: #rekt,#nightride TLS true
Also checkout the Nightride cli at https://github.com/babycommando/nightride-cli
lmm
No. Text-first chat is great, but the people who stuck to IRC this long are all sysadmin-luddites or otherwise deeply weird.
null
alrs
"Modern" is the most passive-aggressive adjective in the history of HN.
iJohnDoe
Impressive. Will give it a try.
anonym29
To be clear, you still can't click, drag, and highlight text for basic operations like quickly and easily copying some text in any Bubbletea/Lipgloss interfaces, right?
Unless that has changed, that dynamic places this behind most other CLI-based IRC clients, including some that are decades old.
yoz-y
Wait, how can you not copy paste from a terminal application?
Or is this about to have break-line aware copy in panes (such as in tmux)?
babycommando
Thats neat actually, will take a look into how viable it can be. Bubbletea (and lipgloss) are like CSS for the terminal, you do the styling, calculate margins, manage responsive things wich is quite cool already. I believe what you mean is totally doable, just that I'm not much of a mouse user myself - it slows me down. Thanks for the feedback.
anonym29
For what it's worth, I rarely do use the mouse in my terminal, but on those few occasions when I do want to, Bubbletea/Lipgloss applications have had a history of being pretty infuriating for me as a user.
P.S. Keep up the great work! The world needs more IRC.
wredcoll
How is this separate from what a terminal normally provides?
Unsolicited feedback, can the IRC screenshots have more contrast (and also not show such a vibrant distracting background).
The combination of those two make it difficult to even see what you’ve made.