Weechat is a lightweight IRC client

May 31, 2023

This is more of a joke post.

Weechat is lightweight

Weechat is incredible, terminal based IRC client, that I wanted to install recently on my FreeBSD instance.

It’s lightweight.

Here is log from my pkg install weechat:

[user@server]# pkg install weechat
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
The following 18 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

New packages to be INSTALLED:
        aspell: 0.60.8_1,1
        glib: 2.72.2,2
        gmp: 6.2.1
        gnutls: 3.7.6
        libedit: 3.1.20210910,1
        libiconv: 1.16
        liblz4: 1.9.3,1
        libtasn1: 4.18.0
        libunwind: 20211201_1
        lua52: 5.2.4
        nettle: 3.8
        p11-kit: 0.24.1_1
        pcre: 8.45_1
        perl5: 5.32.1_1
        ruby: 3.0.4_2,1
        tcl86: 8.6.12
        weechat: 3.5_2
        zstd: 1.5.2

Number of packages to be installed: 18

The process will require 219 MiB more space.
40 MiB to be downloaded.

Proceed with this action? [y/N]:

219 MiB - isn’t it funny? I think it is.
Slack *.dmg file for MacOS takes 168 MiB.

Seriously

Weechat itself is just 26 MiB. It also really is lightweight and feels fast. The number of extension is just countless. Number of color themes and layouts is huge too.

The 219 MiB comes from dependencies and you can see there are few programming languages are going to be installed:

perl
lua
ruby
tcl

These are not direct dependencies of weechat. It’s just weechat’s extension system allows you to use many programming languages to write extensions.

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