Aside from Rich Integration (which is arguably also there if you include bots/scripting), most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders. What's missing I think is a pretty UI and lots of marketing.
> > most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders.
> Keyword: most. So: not all of them. So, there will be a mismatch and a mish-mash between features.
You can't judge a protocol by the subset of UI features supported by all of its clients. That's unfair to all open protocols.
If you want to talk about UI, you should evaluate each client independently.
> At this point someone on HN suggests IRCCloud... which is exactly the same as Slack (proprietary chat-as-a-service).
Except IRCCloud still uses the open protocol, so it's easier for users to switch to a different client. (Which, hopefully, is also an insentive for IRCCloud to not fuck up things too much in the future.)
