Gtk2 or gtk3 doesn't matter so much to me, the ability to theme the apps is absolutely important though, apps should work with a user's choices in that regard, this is one of the hallmarks of Linux, and it's great to see others that are of the same mind.

Behaviors:
- system default GTK3 theme followed for main UI
- actual chat area and server list behaves like xfce4-terminal (that is, whether you see black text on a white background, visa versa, or something else, depends on your personal color settings rather than whether your overall use a different GTK theme than the rest of the system
- it is still possible to use the ZoiteChat settings to make it follow a different GTK3 theme than the rest of your system.

Obviously GTK2-ng users should stick with HexChat, and Pidgin fans should stick with Pidgin. But this is very promising!

I believe right now they have manual settings to change a bunch of UI colours together with the chat colours, and that overrides system theming in usually-undesired ways, but if they're open to the idea that the current approach may be more a Windows way of doing things and that Linux users expect theming options to be primarily at the desktop level, then things could definitely improve.

https://github.com/hexchat/hexchat/issues/2047

I think where that leaves me is thinking that ZoiteChat clearly isn't ready to replace HexChat and that HexChat should stick around but not ready to invest effort into improving it yet. What I am probably going to do is go back and forth between HexChat and Brocas's suggestion of Pidgin for a bit to gauge which one more properly belongs on the ISO I'm building. If the answer is HexChat, then I might think a little bit more in a few months about what to do with this GTK2 application on my primarily-GTK3 setup.

In the mean time, keeping HexChat available as-is for everyone building GKT2-ng-centric setups is a no-brainer, but I'm not sure that much work is actually required since it presumably works as is. If you run into any issues, feel free to pick my brain as it is something I use and care about.

By my inclination is to wait as HexChat on Excalibur isn't going anywhere.

I went ahead and created a bug report for ZoiteChat https://github.com/ZoiteChat/zoitechat/issues/334
- Maybe they will clean up their act
- Or maybe I'll warm up to Pidgin
- Or maybe in five months I'll be saying, "Well, a few of the other things that have been bugging me are dealt with. How about that HexChat?"

I wonder how hard it would be to build a HexChat Neo that supports both GTK3 and GTK2-ng at compile-time options.

I'm guessing that would be very doable but slightly more work than I should take on right now with how many unfinished projects I have.

Well me too, I was just thinking about cloning it, removing Windows support (and flatpak), and making a nice fast version in gtk2-ng at least to start with. Would you have any interest in being a co-maintainer on a project like that? Shouldn't be too hard at all, and maybe down the line we look at your suggestion of offering a gtk3 version?

I'm guessing that would be very doable but slightly more work than I should take on right now with how many unfinished projects I have.

Hah, E-Bus probably loves it, they might just as well have used gtk4 as that's the look they seem to be going for.

In fact, i'd bet a coffee, that not long from now, they announce that they are moving to gtk4 because all the horrible horrible limitations in gtk3 that are preventing them from properly "branding" their app.

Creating an IRC client specifically for GTK3 is a great idea for one reason and one reason only, which is that a lot of GTK3 themes these days don't provide an equivalent GTK2 look. But if you aren't even going to work properly with the majority of GTK3 themes, what even is the point?
(Someone might say "Working when GTK2 is removed from Debian", but deliberately breaking GTK2 is silly and moreso now that gtk2-ng exists.)

Actually, it's better than that. It's already in backports too, so if you have backports enabled you can already apt install it on Excalibur today!

But I unfortunately must rate it's usage of GTK3 as somewhat broken (at least as of the last version Debian accepted)
- The menubar doesn't extend the full width of the window, resulting in a funny color change in themes like Devuan's default
- Menus somehow aren't being drawn the same as in normal applications like Mousepad either resulting (again on Devuan's default theme) in menus that lack outer borders and have overly-shaded separators.