This is one of those things that just varies widely between users. I don't use IRC (actually is it still popular at all?), so I couldn't comment about mIRC or Textual.

But I still find VS better than Xcode. OneNote is still the best note taking app I know of. Word on Windows is better than the Mac version, and still probably my favorite collab word processor. And there's no Excel equivalent (it's olap, in-memory, and pivot table support across those two are still w/o peer).

And if you throw on the browser -- that probably covers 95% of the class of apps I spend my time in.