I believe that it's more efficient and gratifying to communicate electronically through a wiki or email, so I don't particularly like the idea of instant messaging socially. However, a bunch of my friends do it so eventually I'll cave in.
So, which chat clients are good for GNU/linux?
I'd prefer to have chat capability in the various different networks, i.e. AOL, Jabber, IRC, etc. I don't mind using a different client for the different nets, but I think multi-protocol clients are especially cool.
I taught myself IRC a few days ago; I found "bitchx", a client that was supposedly great, to be confusing and slightly inefficient compared to more GUI-oriented ones (because you end up typing things like names a lot; I'm sure there is some way to alias things like that in bitchx but the documentation just wasn't very easy to find stuff in). I like XChat a lot better; There are nice buttons to use instead of typing many things, and the client breaks things off into different windows, etc automatically in a good way (bitchx can do this but there are a bunch of confusing commands for doing so, which once again aren't well documented).
Also, one more comment about IRC in general; so confusing! No wonder everyone uses the new IM stuff instead. XChat was billed as a more "graphical" client, but you still have to know about all these weird IRC details. I'm fine with XChat, but there really should be a very very simple graphical way to access it for people who don't know much about computers. I wonder if the gaim IRC plugin is simpler (I haven't tried it yet).
I've heard that "gaim" is a good client in general. It looks okay.
What do you recommend?
Also, can AOL's IM and Jabber support multi-person (i.e. 3+) chats? If so, how do you do it in Gaim (or whichever client you recommend)?
-- BayleShanks