You can master IRC with a few basic commands. In fact I rarely have to use anything more than /join, /leave and /msg <someone>. /me <some text> for announcing a

You can master IRC with a few basic commands. In fact I rarely have to use anything more than /join, /leave and /msg <someone>. /me <some text> for announcing an action. That's about it. (It probably helps that a lot of in-game chat interfaces use a lot of these same commands, as I'm a gamer as well as a programmer.) There's a pretty nice web interface to IRC called irccloud.com which also persists your connection (so you can simply log onto irccloud.com somewhere else, and entire history is preserved).