After transitioning from Opera to Vivaldi as my primary browser, one of the features I have been missing is the IRC client. Granted, I am not a heavy IRC user, but there is this one channel I monitor where some of my friends and former Opera colleagues hang out. I liked the simplicity of the Opera IRC client and I am not quite a fan of the terminal-based ones.

One of my friends pointed me towards WeeChat, which is an extensible chat client. In its basic configuration, it runs in a terminal and looks like any old IRC client. However, it does have support for plug-ins which allows it to connect to many different systems (although I have as of yet only set up IRC), and also for relays, making it possible to use other front-ends.

One such front-end is Glowing Bear, which is web based. It connects to a WeeChat server which has a relay set up. By default, that relay is unencrypted, which is not very safe, but it does support SSL and I found this wonderful guide describing how to set that up with a proper certificate. I configured that, and dropped a copy of the Glowing Bear files to a web-site of my own (which is not really necessary since the connection is direct from browser to WeeChat, but it is nice to know exactly what I am connecting to). With the certificate I got using the configuration guide above I could also make this a https server.

Now I have a replacement for the IRC client. Now I just need to replace the mail client…