A comparison of the amount of stargazers that the GitHub repositories of popular IRC clients have. It orders by a count that has people removed that starred another client's repo after staring it giving a more exact actual popularity count.

irc-client-star-gazers.md

IRC client	latest	total	difference	moved to
lounge	3063	3263	200	weechat(41), shout(40), irssi(39), hexchat(25), Textual(23), 5 others
shout	2975	3777	802	lounge(421), 9 others
hexchat	1641	2092	451	lounge(123), weechat(107), irssi(63), shout(51), 6 others
irssi	1631	2051	420	weechat(119), lounge(108), shout(56), hexchat(44), 6 others
weechat	1409	1716	307	lounge(97), irssi(70), hexchat(46), 7 others
slate	1286	1985	699	shout(300), lounge(127), komanda(122), 7 others
Textual	1268	1648	380	lounge(89), shout(76), 8 others
komanda	1255	1833	578	shout(247), lounge(150), 8 others
limechat	1014	1348	334	Textual(69), shout(59), lounge(43), irssi(38), 6 others
subway	954	1513	559	shout(175), lounge(140), 8 others
KiwiIRC	581	914	333	lounge(85), shout(74), 8 others

Generated by this python script using the following command: python github-compare-stars-date.py markdown=true erming/shout thelounge/lounge hexchat irssi slate mephux/komanda Codeux-Software/Textual weechat thedjpetersen/subway psychs/limechat prawnsalad/KiwiIRC.