XChat or irssi+screen+ssh?

Ever since I started to IRC from my Linux machine, not only I had been a happy (almost) user of XChat for years but also I wrote an XChat plugin for Guile. All that changed when I moved to Finland three years ago and was educated about the benefits of the combination of irssi+screen+ssh, the biggest (perhaps the only one) of them being the persistence connection to IRC. Since then I had been using that combination. After three years, I am having doubts about the choice I made at that time.

XChat might not be able to provide me with a persistent connection to the IRC world but it still provides lots of small features that irssi does not (and in some cases can not) provide that really does matter in the end and one would expect in a modern IRC client, e.g hard-to-miss notifications when I get new messages, saving of logs and DCC-sent-files directly on my local-machine etc.

I switched to back to XChat a few days ago. I mostly feel good about coming back to it but still miss the persistent connection to IRC. Especially when I suspend/resume my laptop. After resuming, XChat happily assumes that everything is exactly how it was before I suspended the laptop and it takes a while in realizing that it needs to re-connect to all networks. In most cases the network connection doesn't take long but in case of very busy networks like ircnet, it takes a lot of time and is therefore a source of annoyance.

The reason I am discussing this here and not doing anything about it is that I currently don't have time do anything about it and if someone has already solved this problem somehow, I would like to know.

Syndicated 2008-08-24 17:46:00 (Updated 2008-08-25 12:08:55) from zeenix