I recently have a need to use the IRC to communicate with my counterparts. I have be looking to either GUI based or CLI based.. and each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. The following were the IRC clients which I managed to test out: CLI based: Weechat IRSSI f-IRC (seems does not support SSL) GUI based: Quassel Smuxi Pidgin-IRC Konversation (KDE based) X-chat I later learnt a way on how to have a daemon listen log to your IRC channel without you switching own your IRC client, hence I tried ZNC. I managed to get ZNC worked on my machine (hence the connection will be localhost: ). However I did not able to connect to remote ZNC for unknown reason. The reason for me to use ZNC is that I want to get my machine into suspend mode while I don't want to miss any important conversation in the channel, so I believe remote ZNC (say, on my private VPS) should work. Opinions are welcomed.