Up until last week, I had been using a patched version of ii as my IRC client, with a frontend based on tmux and some shell scripts (iii).
Recently, I decided to switch to weechat, as I had set it up once or twice for use as a relay with the excellent weechat-relay android client. Configuring weechat for use with the relay was reasonably quick and easy, and I had growing frustrations with maintaining my own IRC client, so I decided to take the plunge and switch, which so far seems to have been the right decision.
My impressions thus far:
The default UI layout is very nice. I'm able to see a good amount of scrollback while also monitoring activity in other channels at the same time.
While I don't bother paying attention to the numbers in the hot list bar at the bottom of the UI, the fact that the numbers change upon activity in other channels is a useful indicator in my peripheral vision, which is nice to have, especially when I'm looking at a different monitor.
Being able to connect to multiple servers at the one time in a single client instance is so much better than needing to run a client for each server I need to connect to. I can view activity in all five servers I'm connected to simultaneously, which is very nice.
Tab completion is actually useful, not that I would have known that using ii...
The playtesting continues...