# XChat

XChat is a multi-platform IRC chat program.

## Gnome 3

To use the new Notifications and messaging tray, activate the following options in Settings > Preferences > Chatting > Alerts:

- Show tray balloons
- Blink tray icon (optional)
- Enable system tray icon: unchecked (the icon appears automatically if you have pending notifications)

## Spell Check

You can enable spell check as-you-type in the preferences, but you might notice that the red squiggly lines never appear, no matter how hard you try to write badly. To enable it completely, you need to install not just the optional dependency enchant, but also the correct dictionary. Find your correct dictionary by searching for hunspell.

    $ pacman -Ss hunspell

Pick out the correct one and install it, eg for English you'll need hunspell-en. You may need to restart XChat after this.

## Issues Joining Channels

Many channels, including #archlinux (on freenode), require that you be identified before you can join the channel. Since it takes Xchat a number of seconds to connect to a network, and then a number of seconds to identify, often times Xchat will try to join channels *before* you are identified, resulting in channels requiring identification not loading. Put another way, if you can't figure out why some channels seem to fail to load when you start xchat, but seem to load fine when you manually join them, you should try the following.

Input the following into xchat (where you would normally type text):

    /set irc_join_delay 10

where 10 represents seconds. You can change this to whatever you need, depending on the speed of the process for you.

## Additional Resources

- Toxin XChat Theme Installer Script

Categories:

- Internet applications
- Internet Relay Chat