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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

My company recently started using HipChat and I really like it. I expected to prefer IRC because of the standard, open protocol and the choice of clients, but the HipChat application works much more smoothly on my Linux desktop than any IRC client I've tried, and it's been adopted more widely across my organization than IRC ever was - making it much more useful, even if that really just comes down to marketing it to appear more accessible. It's working really well.

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Hipchat runs smoother than XChat for you? That's a first.

Hipchat isn't bad but I vastly prefer IRC, particularly with a good IRC bot.

I use bitlbee with hipchat so I can connect from Emacs. It's a bit awkward to set up, but it's a lot better than the official client since it works inside tmux+mosh.

XChat was previously my client of choice, although I don't have much of a need for IRC on a daily basis anymore. Specifically, HipChat's integration with KDE's system tray and general look and feel is much more polished, IMO.

Out of curiosity, what do you do with your IRC bots? I know HipChat can have bots, so I'd assume some similar functionality is possible. But Hipchat doesn't have decades of community developed bots, so IRC has a long head start.

HuBot and mmBot (a C#/.NET port) has an adapter for hipchat

And for Jabbr, which is a Jabber implementation on Signalr (a realtime thingy of .Net).

It's actually pretty neat, you can try it out on : https://jabbr.net (+ it's opensource if you want to implement your own team chat )

I wrote a hosted bot service, to save you the hassle of maintaining one. Email me if you want to avoid the beta charge thing: https://www.getinstabot.com

I have the opposite experience, HipChat runs like a dog: http://shiva.pw/hipchat_is_this_normal.jpg

That's HipChat 2.1.1013 running on x64 in Vmware 10.0.2 w/ 8gb of a total of 32gb allocated. Oh yea, I'm doing nothing in HipChat, just idling in a single channel, with two inactive conversations with AFK people open. The chat window contains no animated GIFs or Youtube vids or anything wild either.

I've been strongly considering switching to using a regular XMPP client especially since feature creep seems to be be bringing features I don't want (video chat etc)

Edit: I should add the view is filtered, the CPU load + memory usage in the top is from an encrypted filesystem backup currently running

IRCCloud is nice and sits somewhere in the middle

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