I have considered that but will it work with the GTK2 environment? most of these methods work but the problem is using them with GTK2 when you try to send something to the server. Parse::IRC was a real simple way to do this but I cant get it to work in GTK2 (since it seems that timeouts and IO's never work for me) so I'm going to give Net::IRC a run and see if that works better (though I'm not hopeful).