I need to confess: it’s been a while since I last wrote about the (frankly awesome) IRC client Smuxi.

This hasn’t been intentional, or because we haven’t had reason to. In fact, the last release of Smuxi added some rather neat new features.

It’s just that, well, I sort of forgot.

But today sees Smuxi push out a new bug-fix update to its 0.8.10 release thus giving me an ideal opportunity to make up for my faux pas.

So below I present a quick recap of the features of the new stuff, and the important details how to get it all…

Smuxi’s New Features

We all make typos (me more than most) so word that Smuxi now has Spell Checking pleases me – as well as those who have to read me on IRC – greatly.

Spell Checking in Smuxi IRC

Improvements to text indentation sound boring,I agree. But if you spend lots of time in IRC rooms where people talk a lot (and by ‘a lot’ I don’t mean often, I mean diatribes) then you’ll welcome better spacing in multi-line messages.

You’ll also notice in the screenshot above that tabs now display sever ‘favicons‘, helping you visually distinguish between them.

But perhaps my favourite “new” feature in the latest Smuxi is the quick join bar at the top of the window. It makes joining a channel on one of the support servers (freenode, etc) so much easier.

quick join feature in Smuxi

For more information on what’s new in the latest release and its new update you can head to the Smuxi blog @ smuxi.org/blog/

Install Smuxi

Getting your hands on the latest Smuxi release is as simple as running the following two commands in a new Terminal window:

  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:meebey/ppa
  • sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install smuxi

Smuxi 0.8.10 Summary:

  • Spell Checking
  • Server Favicons
  • Quickjoin Feature
  • Improved Indentation
  • Update Translations

If you need an excuse to try out Smuxi head to the OMG! Ubuntu! IRC channel on Freenode @ #omg!ubuntu! 

IRC smuxi