KVIrc

The major version increment from 3 to 4 reflects a big milestone reached by the project: the port to Qt4 has been officially completed. New features include a totally rewritten MDI subsystem, better support for CAPS, STARTTLS, SASL authentication, and IRC services, a new UPnP module to remotely map router ports for DCC, a graphical add-on packager, support for animated avatars, support for DBus inter-process communication, many new options, many new KVS commands, a visual class editor for OO scripting, a brand new build system based on CMake, and many bugfixes.

This release is the result of several months of testing, debugging, and improving. It includes Perl scripting support, drag and drop toolbar editing, better Unicode support (adaptive decoding engines and very flexible charset settings), an "Instant-Messenger-like" notifier window, a status bar with applets, micryption support, DCC bandwidth limits, and several scripting engine enhancements including translation capabilities and dcop communication calls.

This release fixes some minor bugs, enforces the security, and updates the online documentation. There are also some small new features like the export function for the events or the echoprivmsg command.

Since the 2.* releases, the source code has been almost completely rewritten. The major differences are the multiserver support, full IPv6 support, SSL support (also over IPv6), Unicode support for the user interface, a better scripting language, and a basic theme engine.

80% of the 2.x features have been already re-implemented and there are a whole bunch of new things to play with. One of the greatest "ChangeLog" entries is the preliminary SSL support that works for IRC and DCC CHAT (both over IPv4 and IPv6). CTCP PAGE support has been added and there were some major changes to the variable management in the scripting language. There is a new escape code for the text icons that can be sent through the IRC servers. The documentation has been reworked a little bit more, and there are some new modules and a lot of new options to try.