How to connect to IRC

[Derex]

HexChat Setup Guide for GTANet

1. Go to the official HexChat download page:
   https://hexchat.github.io/downloads.html

2. Choose the 32‑bit or 64‑bit installer depending on your system.
   You can check this under Settings → System → About on Windows.

3. After downloading and installing HexChat, launch the client.
   

4. Enter your desired Nick name (usually your account name).
   The second and third nickname fields are fallback names in case your main nickname is already in use.

5. Username:
   This can be anything, but if you register an IRC account later, you will have a permanent username and can use multiple nicknames with it.
   Your full IRC identity looks like this:

nickname!username@host

6. In the Network List window, press Add
   Type "GTANet" and hit Enter
   

7. Now let "GTANet" as selected, then hit Edit...

8. Click the default server entry (e.g., newserver/6667 or newserver/6697 ) and replace it with:

 comet.uk.eu.gtanet.com/6697

-> press Enter (Pressing Enter is required to save the server.)

9. Tick Connect to selected server only.
   Tick Connect to this network automatically.

10. Login Method: Choose NickServ (/msg NickServ + password) only if you will register an account on GTANet later.

11. At the top, open the Autojoin Channels tab.

12. Press Add next to it.

13. Type #gto.talk and press Enter.
    (Pressing Enter is required to save the channel.)

14. Press Close

15. Back in the Network List window, you may tick Skip network list on startup if you prefer.
    You can always reopen it via HexChat → Network List.

16. Press Connect, or simply close and reopen HexChat — it will automatically connect to GTANet and join #gto.talk.

Additional Notes

HexChat uses the IRC protocol, which predates modern chat platforms like MSN, Skype, and Discord.
It’s a 25–30+ year‑old technology. HexChat does not include a built‑in dark mode, but you can enable one using configuration files.

Dark Mode Setup

1. Open the Start Menu.
2. Type %APPDATA% and press Enter.
3. Open the HexChat folder.
4. Create or edit colors.conf using Notepad.
   -> Paste the content from: https://pastebin.com/qiyQFvMx
   -> Save
   -> Close file.
5. Create or edit pevents.conf using Notepad.
   -> Paste the content from: https://pastebin.com/CEwXaYSm
   -> Save
   -> Close file.
6. Restart HexChat to apply the changes.

If you did everything good, you'll see something like this:

You can still go to Settings -> Preferences to set a lot of things such as logging

If you need timestamp for e.g. 2026.02.10. 10:11:00:
Interface -> Appearance->Timestamp:

(%Y.%m.%d. %H:%M:%S)

If you need logging:
Chatting -> Logging:
You can tick "Enable logging of conversations to disk"
Log filename:

D://HexChat/logs/%Y-%m-%d/%n-%c.log

(NOTE: This is my personal pattern, so you have to change the start of it. I save my logs to D drive. This pattern will save logs into separate files for each day.)
Timestamp in logfiles:

(%Y.%m.%d. %H:%M:%S)

If you insist to save logs, I recommend you to NOT save logs on an SSD as it will continously write on the drive and will weaken it.