[click170]

Does Pidgin do IRC? I didn't think it did.

I wanted to switch to Pidgin a while back because it had support for the kind of encryption I wanted (public key) and Adium didn't, but I ended up not doing it and I thought the reason was because Pidgin doesn't do IRC.

Am I misinformed?

[Terretta]

Both Pidgin and Adium are based on libpurple[1], which does support IRC.

1. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhatIsLibpurple

"Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box: AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr."[2]

2. http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/pidgin

[sciurus]

IRC is listed as a supported protocol on the front page of http://www.pidgin.im/

[krakensden]

The Pidgin developers are also the libpurple developers- if Adium supports it, so does Pidgin.

[onedognight]

This hasn't always gone the other way however. Adium finally added support for IRC recently, though pidgin and libpurple have had it for years.

[StavrosK]

I just checked to make sure, it does. I think it's had it for years, too.

[saurik]

Yep: Pidgen has supported IRC so long that back when I was still using it, and the project hadn't yet been renamed from Gaim, it already supported it; it had a few stupidities, and didn't support userhost-masks for buddy bindings (something that simply "makes sense" if you use IRC enough), but it definitely worked and still does (I have friends who use it all the time for IRC, and one who even contributes patches to it).