Any IRC clients with VI key binds?

1. I use vim_mode.pl with irssi (in GNU screen) and am extremely satisfied with the combination.

   For anyone who doesn't know Irssi, it's terminal-based and there is no GUI available or planned. While this may put some people off, it makes for a great combination with GNU screen, and allows you to keep your connection while being logged out: Always a good thing to have for IRC and its erratic response times.

   The current version of vim_mode is already pretty sophisticated, has registers, custom mappings and lots of other stuff, and it's still being developed.

   To use vim_mode's ex mode, you'll need the uberprompt.pl script from irssi-scripts/prompt_info (same developers).

   The most up-to-date documentation is in the .pl file itself. If you have further questions or suggestions, the developers (and a few of us lowly users) hang out on #irssi_vim/Freenode and are generally very friendly and responsive.

2. An alternative solution would be to use the unixy bare-bones ii IRC client by the suckless community with Vim itself.

   ii creates a directory structure in the file system and places FIFOs for channels and server messages that can be written to and read from.

   On the ii page, you can find a link to a working setup that uses multitail for split windows, Vim for entry, and shell scripts and screen for glue.

   Multitail can be configured to get (non-dynamic) highlighting for the IRC logs, and if you'd buffer the logs, you can use Vim's 'complete' option to get dynamic word completion from them.

Now that Emacs has more than decent Vi-key emulation package, Evil, ERC is a very viable solution for this. After a little tuning, chatting using ERC and Evil can be very vim experience.

Vim itself has an IRC plugin.