< How I Know It's Time to Leave
what terminal program do you use for IRC I try to use the terminal as much as possible although I am not against the GUI and yes I do remember mIRC but these days seems like almost every linux distro has Hexchat installed right out of the box.
I use irssi. It's just an "apt install" (or equivalent) away. You'd use a command like:
irssi -c freenode
Only catch is that freenode has to be define in the config file in the .irssi directory. That dir is in your user's home directory.
I can send you mine if you need it. The official docs are way too verbose in my opinion. These ones are more succinct: http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Irssi