Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfers via Direct Client-to-Client.
XChat is a popular Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client. It is available for Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows (with additional features), Mac OS X (X-Chat Aqua), and for other X Window System-based systems. It has a choice of a tabbed document interface or tree interface, support for multiple servers and is highly configurable. Both command line and graphical versions are available.