achat and irc.austn.net · Austin French

I run an IRC server at irc.austn.net. It's Ergo, a modern IRC server in Go, behind TLS with a real certificate. IRC is old and it still works, and it's a nice thing for friends and bots to share.

achat is the client I wanted for it: three panes, channels on the left, messages in the middle, users on the right, and a prompt at the bottom. It connects over TLS, authenticates with SASL the way the protocol intends, reconnects cleanly, and stays out of the way.

achat in a terminal: channels pane on the left with #general selected, the message pane showing a join line and a hello message, a users pane on the right, the prompt at the bottom, and a key hint bar — Connected to irc.austn.net over TLS as a guest. The hint bar always shows what the keys do.

How it's put together

The protocol library never leaks past the service, so the state and the UI are tested without a network.

The protocol stays behind one wall. irc-framework handles parsing, capabilities and SASL, and a thin IrcService turns its events into a single typed union. Nothing else in the app sees the library.
The service owns membership. IRC's quit and nick events don't say which channels they touched, so the client tracks who is in each channel itself and re-sorts the user list by prefix on every change.
Secrets stay in one file, written with 600 permissions and ignored by git. Flags on the command line override it, but the password never goes on the command line.
The UI is tested headless with ink-testing-library, plus a smoke test that runs the real binary in a pseudo-terminal.

I wrote the brief and ran the build as an agent, and kept a DECISIONS.md with every choice, the reason, and the alternative that lost. It's a good way to build a small tool: the decisions are the part worth reading later.