XChat-GNOME is a new frontend to the popular X-Chat IRC client which is
designed with the user interface foremost in mind. Historically, the
OSS desktop has been steadily improving in usability, accessibility,
and general slickness, yet the world of IRC clients has not kept up.
With IRC being one of the fundamental methods of communication within
the open source community, it is bizzare that this area has been
neglected.

GNOME's philosophy in terms of user interfaces has been progressing
towards presenting the user with few options and sane defaults. While
many of the normal X-Chat options will be preserved inside GConf and
the xchat config files, only the most common settings will be included
in the main user interface.

The authors decided that the GTK+ frontend provided excessive
customizability without sufficient organization, which lead to clutter
and confusion. As such, XChat-GNOME was born, and is gaining
popularity as an IRC client for people who care more about chatting
than tweaking settings. If anyone is interested in helping out with the
project, stop by #xchat-gnome on irc.freenode.net.