Refuge for Colloquy Users
Download theme: Colloquial.zip (4kb). (Just extract and copy to ~/Library/Application Support/LimeChat/Themes/.)
At Last.fm, we use IRC all the time. We use it to communicate, to see when someone deploys or checks in code and—above all—to party. So my IRC client is one of the apps I use most.
When I started working for Last.fm in 2006, I didn’t even know what IRC was. Young and innocent, people just set up Colloquy, for me and off I went, being goatsed and lemonpartied. I’ve used Colloquy ever since, but some things about it bothered me. As a non-native speaker, the floating dictionary panel (command+control+d) is heaven-sent. Yet Colloquy was the only Mac app (Firefox, in my opinion, not counting as a Mac app) I encountered that didn’t support it. Double-clicking to select a word would often select the entire chat. The sidebar didn’t quite look right, and the drag-to-reorder thing for the channels never really worked for me. And don’t even start about the entire chat window just going blank all of a sudden.
Now, every app has its issues. But usually, they’re worked out over time. Colloquy hasn’t seen a new release in more than seven months. And looking at their trac timeline, it doesn’t like like one is coming anytime soon.
Always eager to try out something new, I gave LimeChat a shot and quite liked its minimalism. It’s not without issues either, but they’re small and because LimeChat is very new and actively developed, I hope they’ll be resolved soon. The only thing that bothered me was that it looked kinda crappy, so I made a theme that looks (almost) like Colloquy. It’s not exactly the epitome of beauty, but it’s better than the default.