[arm]

That behaviour sounds great, although I’m curious which old IRC clients you are referring to. I actually make use of an old Power Mac G3 (B&W) running Mac OS 9 for connecting to some IRC servers (using ircle) and in its case, at least, nicks are assumed to be 10 characters or less. This is quite annoying since there are active users on the channels who have nicks longer than that, so the client simply displays their messages with the extra characters of their nick cut off (to keep the messages left aligned). While I suppose ircle could dynamically resize the area for nicks based on the length of the longest nick that has posted a message, that could be pretty inefficient… not to mention if the channel messages are being logged in a text file with messages left-aligned in there as well (which is what ircle does); the whole file would have to be recreated.

[vertex-four]

> While I suppose ircle could dynamically resize the area for nicks based on the length of the longest nick that has posted a message, that could be pretty inefficient

XChat does exactly this. So do a few other clients still.

[scourge]

irssi? good basic client that will never let you down. it can grow with you