Yeah, I use weechat.

But in the interest of sharing something new: I do also like ii, which is a minimal filesystem-based IRC client. To tail a channel's messages, for example, you could do

tail -f #vim/out

Then to send a message,

echo 'Hello, world!' > #vim/in

Fun for the first five minutes just pulling together a makeshift IRC client with tmux panes and the above, but then you realize the depth of the iceberg with its scriptability with standard Unix pipelines. Tail out into a perl script that pipes back into in for example and you have a bot.

I used to use Weechat in a screen instance on my home server to keep persistence but I moved to Convos.chat and it's pretty nice. The client runs on your server, you interact with that via your browser. The webapp has some nice features like the ability to host files for sharing with other users, inline link previews and searches.