I haven't had much occasion to use it (I dipped into a gaming group that used Matrix but quickly fell out of it) but https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix seems mostly adequate if you are a weechat user and just need the text chat features. Feels just like IRC.
weechat-matrix gets a lot of attention, works really well, has full E2EE support, and weechat at least is in major package managers. Matrix is evolving pretty fast though, so you'll probably have to install your own matrix plugin from https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix.
Meanwhile gomuks also exists and is usable and not abandoned.
On GUI Desktop, various clients are in active dev - e.g. Fractal for GTK/Rust, Quaternion for Qt/C++, Nheko for Qt/QML, etc. They are not as complete as Riot yet, but I'm sure PRs are welcome...
using matrix via weechat using the new python weechat-matrix (https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix) plugin should give a very convincing IRC on steroids experience; it even has e2e encryption landing. The emacs matrix client (mclient.el) is also in active dev again.
Riot is also good, but probably too bloated for your tastes :)
For a nicely documented and clean Matrix client implementation in Python, see weechat-matrix[1] and the matrix-nio[2] library it's based on. There's also Mirage[3] which is also based on matrix-nio and is a GUI client.
Matrix is really nice. I hope that some of the TUI clients improve a bit, though. I absolutely loved the weechat plugin made in lua, but it'd often take several tries to connect. One day I couldn't connect at all, and there hasn't been github activity lately. It was the only client I found that let me actually reorder rooms and people manually. I really hate the constantly changing order that I can't seem to configure in Riot. Gomuks lacks a lot of good keybinds and stuff that weechat did right by default for being weechat. The emacs package matrix-client.el is alright but tricky to get going due to using quelpa, which none of my other stuff uses. I also have only used it graphically in emacs, so not sure how it is in non-graphical emacs. These little disappointments in the clients make me still prefer irc for a lot of things, but easily sharing images and such on matrix is pretty nice.
It's a shame that the Matrix website listing clients[1] don't mention weechat-matrix and instead mentions the outdated Lua plugin[2] that doesn't support Megolm at all.
I've been using Riot for a few years and it's nice, but it would've been nice to know that there is a modern Weechat plugin implementation (I was half considering writing one myself).
It's also super neat to see that they wrote their own Python Matrix client library[3], which is something I also needed for another idea I'm working on (the library linked to from the Matrix site also seems to be less suitable than this one).
It really doesn't. The best option is weechat-matrix, but that's already a dead project. The lack of good client diversity is what is holding me back from using Matrix.
Is there a weechat plugin for Matrix that currently supports e2e encryption? Last I checked, it was using an older version of the encryption that was not compatible with recent Matrix servers.
I would love to use weechat for Matrix, as I'm not a big fan of the Riot client.
With Matrix there is also a lack of good lightweight clients and servers. The official client uses Electron. It will never be an alternative to the IRC with this attitude. There is a Weechat plugin but it's in Python...
I'm looking forward to the weechat-matrix-rs project becoming usable, so I can also use it as a Matrix client.
reply