BitchX is a free IRC client and has been considered to be the most popular ircII-based IRC client. The initial implementation, written by "Trench" and "HappyCrappy", was a script for the IrcII chat client. It was converted to a program on its own right by panasync (Colten Edwards). BitchX 1.1 final was released in 2004. It is written in C, and is a console application. GTK+ toolkit support has been dropped. It works on all Unix-like operating systems, and is distributed under a BSD license. It is originally based on ircII-EPIC and eventually it was merged into the EPIC IRC client. It supports IPv6, multiple servers and SSL and UTF-8 partially.
BitchX has frequently been noted to be a popular IRC client for Unix-like systems.
Development of BitchX was on hiatus for a while but is now resuming from Sourceforge project page. There is no official new release but the sources for a future 1.2 release are available from Subversion repository.
Read more about BitchX: Security