My earlier patch for the xchat-gnome userlist setting was accepted upstream some months ago, but sadly, version 0.26.2 is still unreleased, so the code is only in git and didn’t make it into Lucid. Ah well.

For now, have another patch — this one turns the transparency slider in xchat-gnome settings into true alpha transparency, a la gnome-terminal, if desktop compositing is enabled (like with Compiz). As a bonus, it prevents xchat-gnome from crashing if the transparency setting is enabled with Murrine RGBA support turned on.

The PPA for Karmic and Lucid is here. It has both the user list and transparency patches applied.

I may be a minority regarding this choice, but I’ve always preferred xchat-gnome to plain xchat as my IRC client. Its minimalist interface fits well with my GNOME desktop, and the preferences dialogue is much cleaner than in regular xchat.

The only annoyance is the user list, which upstream insists on hiding behind a button despite all pleas to provide an option to show it in its own panel. Finally, I wrote a patch adding that option about a year ago, and today I fixed a bug with UI freeze in it.

I’ll try to get it into Lucid, but in case the core devs decide not to sponsor it, I’ve made a PPA for Karmic with the patched version.