A modern terminal IRC client built with Rust, Ratatui, and Tokio.

Inspired by irssi. Designed for the future.

Terminal, mobile web, and desktop web — all in real-time sync:

TUI (left) | Mobile web (center) | Desktop web (right) — 1:1 state sync across all interfaces.

• Full IRC protocol — channels, queries, CTCP, TLS, channel modes, ban/except/invex lists
• IRCv3 — server-time, echo-message, away-notify, account-notify, chghost, multi-prefix, BATCH netsplit grouping, message-tags, and more
• SASL — PLAIN, EXTERNAL (client certificate), and SCRAM-SHA-256
• irssi-style navigation — Esc+1–9 window switching, aliases, familiar /commands
• Mouse support — click buffers and nicks, scroll chat history
• Lua 5.4 scripting — event bus, custom commands, full IRC and state access, sandboxed per-script environments
• Persistent logging — SQLite with WAL, FTS5 full-text search, optional AES-256-GCM encryption
• Netsplit detection — batches join/part floods into single events
• Flood protection — blocks CTCP spam and nick-change floods automatically
• Nick coloring — deterministic per-nick colors (WeeChat-style) with HSL hue wheel for truecolor, 256-color and 16-color fallbacks, auto-detected terminal capability, configurable saturation/lightness
• Theming — irssi-compatible format strings with 24-bit color support and custom abstracts
• Web frontend — built-in HTTPS web UI with mobile support, real-time sync with the terminal, swipe gestures, 5 themes
• DCC CHAT — direct client-to-client messaging with active and passive (reverse) connections
• Spell check — inline correction with Hunspell dictionaries, multilingual, Tab to cycle suggestions, computing/IT dictionary with 7,400+ terms, replace and highlight modes
• Embedded shell — full PTY terminal inside Repartee (/shell) — run vim, btop, irssi without leaving the client. Also available in the web frontend via beamterm WebGL2 renderer with Nerd Font, mouse selection, Ctrl+/- font resize, and clipboard paste
• Detach & reattach — detach from your terminal and reattach later; IRC connections stay alive
• Extban — $a:account ban type with /ban -a shorthand
• Single binary — ~20MB (SQLite, Lua, and WASM frontend bundled). No external C libraries required for image preview

Download from GitHub Releases:

cargo install repartee

git clone https://github.com/outragedevs/repartee.git
cd repartee
make release
./target/release/repartee

• Build: Rust 1.85+ (2024 edition) — install via rustup
• A terminal with 256-color or truecolor support (iTerm2, Alacritty, kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, Subterm, etc.)
• A modern web browser for the web frontend (optional)

Launch repartee:

repartee

Add a server and connect:

/server add libera irc.libera.chat
/connect libera
/join #repartee

Or edit ~/.repartee/config.toml directly:

[servers.libera]
label    = "Libera"
address  = "irc.libera.chat"
port     = 6697
tls      = true
autoconnect = true
channels = ["#repartee"]

~/.repartee/
  config.toml        # main configuration
  .env               # credentials (SASL passwords, log encryption key)
  themes/            # custom .theme files
  scripts/           # Lua scripts
  logs/messages.db   # chat logs (SQLite)
  sessions/          # Unix sockets for detached sessions

repartee can run in the background while you close your terminal:

# Detach: press Ctrl+Z or type /detach — terminal is restored
# Reattach from any terminal:
repartee a

# Or start headless (no terminal needed):
repartee -d
repartee a       # attach when ready

Everything survives detach — IRC connections, scrollback, scripts, and channel state.

Scripts are Lua 5.4 files placed in ~/.repartee/scripts/:

meta = {
    name        = "hello",
    version     = "1.0",
    description = "Greet users on join",
}

function setup(api)
    api.on("irc.join", function(event)
        if event.nick ~= api.our_nick() then
            api.irc.say(event.channel, "Welcome, " .. event.nick .. "!")
        end
    end)
end

Load at runtime:

/script load hello

Or autoload in config:

[scripts]
autoload = ["hello"]

Themes are TOML files in ~/.repartee/themes/ using irssi-compatible format strings with 24-bit color extensions:

[colors]
bg        = "1a1b26"
fg        = "a9b1d6"
highlight = "e0af68"
nick_self = "7aa2f7"

[abstracts]
pubmsg  = "{pubmsgnick $0}$1"
own_msg = "{ownmsgnick $0}$1"

Set the active theme:

[general]
theme = "mytheme"

Full documentation is available at repart.ee/docs.

• Installation
• Quick Start
• Configuration
• Themes
• Commands
• Web Frontend
• Sessions & Detach
• Lua Scripting
• Lua API Reference
• Logging & Search

• Web frontend improvements — added persistent web sessions, a login form, clickable chat links, and server-generated image previews.
• Image preview SSRF hardening — /api/preview now blocks private, loopback, link-local, cloud metadata, and other non-public targets across direct URLs, redirects, and og:image follow-up fetches.

• Log browser event rendering fix — repartee l now renders persisted event text directly, so JOIN/PART/MODE/KICK/NICK/QUIT lines keep their original nick/channel/mode details instead of expanding empty event templates.
• Fan-out event reference resolution — secondary-channel QUIT/NICK log rows now resolve their ref_id primary row when reading history, preventing blank timestamp-only lines in multi-channel event history.

• Read-only log browser — repartee l / repartee logs opens the SQLite history directly, without connecting to IRC or starting scripts/web services. It supports network headers, day separators, paged scrollback loading, /search, and encrypted-log fallback behavior.
• Paste-burst connection hardening — updated to irc-repartee 1.5.1 so internal IRC PING/PONG traffic uses a priority lane and cannot be starved behind flood-throttled paste backlogs.
• More tolerant local ping timeout — repartee now sets the IRC client ping response timeout to 60 seconds instead of inheriting the upstream 20-second default.

• Live ban-list tracking — channel +b/-b mode changes now keep the local ban list current, and joined channels silently sync MODE #channel b so /unban numeric references and wildcard removals work without repeatedly refreshing /ban.
• Themeable WHOIS replies — WHOIS numerics now carry event keys and structured parameters for [formats.events], with default and Spring theme entries for the common WHOIS lines.
• Complete server-add configuration — /server add now exposes the practical connection parameters in command parsing and help, including TLS verification, reconnect behavior, SASL, autosend commands, bind IP, encoding, password, and client certificate path.

• IRCnet reop mode handling — updated to irc-proto-repartee 1.2.2 so channel mode +R/-R is parsed as the reop list mode with masks, while registered-only remains lowercase +r.
• Batched list modes — /reop, /except, /invex, and their removal commands now batch multiple masks as +RRR/-RRR, +eee/-eee, and +III/-III according to the server MODES limit.
• Mode display regression tests — added coverage for r/R rendering and multi-mask list-mode display.

• Memory bounds and long-session hardening — capped oversized input history entries, bounded socket output buffering, capped storage writer pending rows, and limited IRCv3 batch retention to prevent unbounded memory growth under bursty or degraded conditions.
• Web UI memory discipline — capped client-side messages per buffer and reduced broad signal cloning in the chat, layout, and nick-list components.
• Web build refresh — regenerated bundled web frontend assets for the release.

• Web session isolation and auth hardening — web shell snapshots and active-buffer state are now isolated per session, WebSocket auth no longer sends bearer tokens in the URL, and session validation enforces client IP continuity.
• Secret storage hardening — E2E private material stored in SQLite is now encrypted at rest, with compatibility for existing databases during migration.
• Local runtime hardening — ~/.repartee runtime files now use owner-only permissions where required, TLS/private env material is written securely, and local attach rejects peers from a different Unix UID.

• RPE2E end-to-end encryption — native E2E for repartee with per-peer trust, pending accept/decline flow, reciprocal key exchange, key export/import, revoke/reverify, and channel/query support.
• Cross-client interoperability — bundled companion scripts for WeeChat and Irssi/Eerssi now speak the same compact RPE2E v1 wire format, including long-message chunking, UTF-8/emoji handling, auto-handshake, and debug output directly in the current buffer.
• Operational hardening — multiple state-handling fixes landed across repartee and companion scripts: atomic E2E export/import where applicable, safer forget/reverify cleanup, improved multi-peer handshake tracking, and plaintext bypass for bot-style commands starting with . or !.

• Critical: fix 3 GB OOM crash on long mouse-wheel scroll — the chat view's render loop could walk the entire message buffer on every frame when scroll_offset exceeded available content. Under sustained wheel scrolling this produced 200–600 MB/s of allocation churn, fragmenting glibc's arena until the kernel (or systemd-oomd) killed the process at ~3 GB RSS. The loop is now capped at buffer_len × 16 visual lines so it terminates in O(buffer_len) regardless of scroll position. Observed on Debian with v0.8.4 after a week of uptime; pre-existing bug, not a 0.8.4 regression, but v0.8.4 had enough baseline churn to make it reachable in normal use.
• jemalloc on Linux — tikv-jemallocator is now the global allocator on Linux builds via #[cfg(target_os = "linux")]. Defense-in-depth against glibc ptmalloc2 fragmentation in long-running sessions (weeks of uptime). macOS keeps libsystem_malloc, FreeBSD keeps its native jemalloc — builds on those platforms are byte-identical to v0.8.4, the dependency is not pulled into their build graph at all.
• Regression tests — six unit tests lock in the render-budget invariant so the OOM cannot regress silently; tests are organized under compute_render_budget::... for IDE filtering and carry diagnostic assert messages.

• Web: sticky scroll — auto-scroll now only scrolls to bottom when you're already there; scroll-up to read backlog stays put. Scroll-to-bottom button (▼) appears when scrolled up
• Web: event_key parity — web frontend now receives per-event-type keys (join, part, quit, kick, kicked, nick_change, topic_changed, mode, connected, disconnected, chghost, account) for themed icons and colors instead of fragile text heuristics
• Web: notice rendering — notices now render with -nick- text format and distinct cyan styling
• Web: nick truncation — accounts for mode prefix width (@, +) like the TUI does
• Kick notification — when kicked from a channel, the message now appears in the server status window, the channel buffer (before removal), and the landing buffer (where you end up). Themed as kicked event with red highlight
• /kick and /kb accept #channel — you can now specify a target channel: /kick #otherchan nick reason
• Web: in-memory FetchMessages — initial buffer loads serve from in-memory messages first, ensuring recent events (like kick notifications) are visible immediately even before the log writer flushes to SQLite
• event_key persisted to DB — backward-compatible migration adds event_key TEXT column so historical messages retain their event type for themed rendering
• CI: WASM build step — release workflow now builds the WASM frontend in a separate job, ensuring every release binary includes the latest web UI
• Removed dead MessageType::Ctcp variant

• Web buffer sync reliability fixes

MIT — see LICENSE.