While IRC is fundamentally a plain-text protocol, most modern clients support rich text formatting—including bolding, underlining, italics, and custom colours—using specific control characters embedded in messages.
1. How Text Formatting Works
IRC formatting is handled by injecting invisible control codes (or shorthand markup symbols) into your chat text. When your client receives these codes, it renders the visual style before displaying the message.
- Bold: Triggered by control code
Ctrl+B(or\x02). Placing this before and after text toggles bold formatting on and off. - Underline: Triggered by control code
Ctrl+U(or\x1F). - Italics: Triggered by control code
Ctrl+I(or\x16or\x1Ddepending on the client). - Colours: Triggered by control code
Ctrl+K(or\x03), typically followed by a two-digit number (00–99) corresponding to a standard IRC colour palette. You can also specify background colours using a comma separator (e.g.,Foreground,Background). - Reset: Triggered by control code
Ctrl+O(or\x0F), which instantly clears all active colours, bolds, and styles back to standard text.
2. Client Support
Virtually all modern graphical IRC clients—such as HexChat, The Lounge, AdiIRC, WeeChat, and modern mobile apps—fully support parsing and rendering these formatting codes.
However, users running pure command-line tools or legacy terminal environments without color support will see raw control characters or plain text. Furthermore, some channel operators discourage excessive colouring or bolding in busy chat rooms to maintain readability.
3. Using User Mode +S (Strip Formatting)
If you find text formatting distracting, or if you want to automatically strip out control codes and colours from incoming messages, you can apply user mode +S if supported by the network.
- What it does: Setting
+Sinstructs the server to strip all incoming colour codes, bolds, and formatting tags from messages before they hit your client, forcing everything to display as clean, uniform plain text. - How to set it:
Plaintext