HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

brocashelm · 2026-02-23 02:54:16

Saddened by the abandonment of HexChat by upstream? Say no more: ZoiteChat to the rescue.

It looks and feels the same as HexChat did, except it's ported from GTK2 to GTK3.

You can download the source code or get it for your platform (on GNU/Linux, AppImage and Flatpak binaries are the official builds) here.

Last edited by brocashelm (2026-02-23 05:22:11)

ralph.ronnquist · 2026-02-23 03:14:37

Beware! That's still on github

EDX-0 · 2026-02-23 05:51:08

github is a popular forge, which is good for discovery and visibility of a project.

ralph.ronnquist · 2026-02-23 06:06:21

github = Microsoft. Stay away!

EDX-0 · 2026-02-23 06:15:12

i have all my repos in github, been mirroring to gitlab, codeberg and more recently the devuan gitea instance, i'm not getting any repo off github cuz it does help visibility but i do have to update all my readme files with links to the mirrors.

ralph.ronnquist · 2026-02-23 06:28:18

Everyone makes their own choice about what is important.
I jumped off github when I learnt they sold out to Microsoft.

ruenoak · 2026-02-23 08:21:44

This does look exciting! Have grabbed the Appimage and sofar it is working well. Looks like my Hexchat custom theme config will work with this as well. Good find!

greenjeans · 2026-02-26 00:48:44

Sweet! I do prefer Hexchat for IRC, was sad to hear it's no longer in the repo.

ruenoak · 2026-03-30 02:48:33

Hi all, I have been using Zoitechat since It was posted here. I upgraded from 2.17.4 to 2.18.0 pre5 about a week ago now and it is working very well, version 2.18.0 pre5 supports gtk3 theme switching. There is a bug with the spell check underlining which the dev knows about and is working on it.

I'm using the Appimage on Devuan, but also testing the Snap build as well. Of course I don't think Snaps will be much of an interest here.

chomwitt · 2026-06-24 08:20:23

Why Hexchat is abandoned? Also since Hexchat is in Devuan repos isnt that still a plus ?

greenjeans · 2026-06-24 14:19:24

Why Hexchat is abandoned?

No longer maintained: https://hexchat.github.io/news/2.16.2.html

ZoiteChat now in debian testing : https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … ug=1120756

Last edited by greenjeans (2026-06-24 14:21:19)

WEBDEVDESTROYER2000 · 2026-07-05 14:49:48

I built ZoiteChat from source.

Uityyy · 2026-07-06 00:17:36

Thanks for the heads up!

ZoiteChat now in debian testing

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.

Uityyy · 2026-07-06 00:27:10

Yikes! This thing apparently hard codes colors and doesn't even honor the dark mode of Adwaita-dark, which even the cultural vandals behind Stop Theming My App would respect. I sure hope the folks behind this consider it an unfinished work-in-progress and not something ready to be compared favorably with HexChat yet.

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.)

Last edited by Uityyy (2026-07-06 00:31:13)

greenjeans · 2026-07-06 17:29:44

Oh my that's terrible looking, all stark white, with no borders on the drop-down menus so they smoosh into the main window and it all looks mashed up. Lol somebody hardcoded that color scheme in there?

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.

Last edited by greenjeans (2026-07-06 17:34:09)

greenjeans · 2026-07-06 17:39:48

In fact the more I think about it, we may just have to save ol' Hexchat, it's a fine app, very mature and no major flaws that I see so doesn't seem like maintenance would be difficult, and as Uityyy pointed out, it does indeed run fine on gtk2-ng.

golinux · 2026-07-06 17:49:43

I second that most excellent idea! It still works fine for me on Daedalus but sooner or later . . .

Uityyy · 2026-07-06 18:57:36

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.

greenjeans · 2026-07-06 23:35:03

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?

Uityyy · Yesterday 03:59:31

Unfortunately none of my programming experience since college is in C -- a matter I should correct -- so I couldn't get up-to-speed as quickly as some on improving it. I also took a look at their old thread about adding GTK3 support and see

The current textbox is a 100% custom mess. It has in the past had a direct port to GTK3 but is such a mess that it was full of bugs and performance issues.

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?"

golinux · Yesterday 13:39:23

Please do let us know when/if you ever figure it out.

Uityyy · Yesterday 20:21:14

Here's the response I got to my ZoiteChat bug report. It gives me slightly more hope that a future version of that fork may play nicer with Linux desktops:

The default result is definitely not ideal. The way theming works in Zoitechat is not like Hexchat. Which was partially on purpose. You would need to select the GTK3 theme inside Zoitechat's preferences to have a better experience. It is not perfect by any means.
It was mostly to handle changing gtk3 themes in a similar way on Windows and Linux.
Currently I have been thinking of hiding the theme selector in Zoitechat on *nix based systems and just use the theme selected within the OS. and on windows have the GTK3 theme selector show in preferences.

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.

Last edited by Uityyy (Yesterday 20:25:07)

golinux · Yesterday 21:43:49

Please do let us know when/if you ever figure it out.

Uityyy · Yesterday 23:07:34

I think ZoiteChat is going to work out well for GTK3 users. :-) They have just as of three hours ago created a branch to test out better GKT3 system-theme handling. I have built it and it behaves very well. https://github.com/ZoiteChat/zoitechat/ … ency-fixes

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!

greenjeans · Today 01:15:09

Nice! Thank you for your efforts, that's very encouraging that they would listen to input and act upon it.

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.

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#1 2026-02-23 02:54:16

HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#2 2026-02-23 03:14:37

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#3 2026-02-23 05:51:08

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#4 2026-02-23 06:06:21

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#5 2026-02-23 06:15:12

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#6 2026-02-23 06:28:18

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#7 2026-02-23 08:21:44

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#8 2026-02-26 00:48:44

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#9 2026-03-30 02:48:33

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#10 2026-06-24 08:20:23

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#11 2026-06-24 14:19:24

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#12 2026-07-05 14:49:48

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#13 2026-07-06 00:17:36

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#14 2026-07-06 00:27:10

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#15 2026-07-06 17:29:44

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#16 2026-07-06 17:39:48

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#17 2026-07-06 17:49:43

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#18 2026-07-06 18:57:36

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#19 2026-07-06 23:35:03

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#20 Yesterday 03:59:31

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#21 Yesterday 13:39:23

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#22 Yesterday 20:21:14

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#23 Yesterday 21:43:49

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#24 Yesterday 23:07:34

Re: HexChat's GTK3 Successor: ZoiteChat

#25 Today 01:15:09

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