There are very many ways to send instant messages and participate in group chats. I'm one of those who xkcd #1782 is about, who prefers IRC over anything else.
With many people using other networks and platforms, it is desirable to in one way or another make those technologies accessible from an irc client. For years I've been having setups enabling sms text messaging with an irc like interface, and there are some vague memories of me being an early enough adoptor of bitlbee to have provided hosting for its web pages in the early days.
A couple of months ago I moved to using my regular irc client for Slack and Matrix, which made for a great increase in usability. However it also resulted in there being too many channels and too little segmentation. Weechat has a feature request in issue #471 with title Support multiple hotlists which could address this problem, but zero progress has been made since the ticket was filed six years ago. Properly designing and implementing that change is a too large project for me to be bothered with. Instead I hacked up micmot, an ugly workaround which kind of accomplishes the same thing.
Multiple Irc Clients Multiplexed Over Tmux (micmot) is a couple scripts for irssi, weechat and the shell to abuse tmux to give an overview over chat activity in multiple irc clients.
_ __ ____ ___ (_)________ ___ ____ / /_ / __ `__ \/ / ___/ __ `__ \/ __ \/ __/ / / / / / / / /__/ / / / / / /_/ / /_ /_/ /_/ /_/_/\___/_/ /_/ /_/\____/\__/ d Launch weechat for slack as user slack i Launch irssi as current user w Launch weechat as current user q Quit micmot. (Will not kill other panes) > [chat] 0:micmot* 1:weechat- 2:[#channel,someone]- 3:slack >"micmot" 23:54 02-Oct-22
As can be seen above, the name for pane number 2 in the status line has been changed from irssi to [#channel,someone], indicating that there are unread messages on the channel #channel and from the person someone in the irssi client. Had there been new messages in the weechat client on pane 1, or the weechat instance named slack on pane 3, those panes would had been renamed too. Visiting a pane resets the name back to the default.
Anyone actually interested in using this is encouraged to clone the repository, read the source code and configure irssi/weechat to load the script(s). Please let me know if finding it useful.