As of late last night. I made the decision to make a full on release of the first alpha of PChat 2.0.0, this is a very rough release, and well, here be dragons, considered yourself warned. That said if you are brave enough to test and help me take care of the rough edges, that would be fantastic.

Application: PChat
Category: Internet
Description: PChat is an IRC client with an easy to use and customizable interface, scriptability, multiple language support, multiple network, auto-connect, join, identity, proxy support, SASL, DCC, and more.

Download PChat Portable 2.0.0 Alpha 1 Development Test 1 [ 63.2MB download / 174MB installed ]
(sha256: fa443ba9990602e2f33c35bc7405a324b15ad65143bc0a6a81a243c0d92a796b)

Release Notes:
Development Test 1 (2025-12-24):
Major Changes

  • Complete GTK3 Migration: Fully migrated from legacy GTK2 to modern GTK3 APIs
  • New Text Widget: Replaced custom xtext widget with GTKTextView for better maintainability and future GTK4 compatibility
  • Modern Build System: Added comprehensive CMake build system
  • Code Modernization: Merged latest HexChat common code and modernized codebase
  • Audio Player Plugin: Full-featured audio player with FFmpeg/FAudio support (also sports it’s own gui as well as command options)
  • Notification Plugin: Cross-platform desktop notification support
  • Not so prevalent for windows: macOS Native Integration: gtk-mac-integration support for native menu bar
  • Memory Management: Standardized to use GLib memory functions (g_malloc, g_free, etc.)
  • Buffer overflow prevention through bounds-checked string operations and Shell escape sequence handling for file paths

I’ve included all the plugins for this release, as I want to test what I currently have, what isn’t included is the perl, python, and lua ones currently. I still need to work on those. Overall I chose to do an alpha test since this is a huge major upgrade from PChat 1.5.4 that I release many moons ago so I’m expecting a lot of issues that I need eyes on.

Once this hits beta, I’ll will move the plugins to their own installers which should reduce the size of the overall package.

I appreciate the help!