Brygga

A modern, fast, feature-rich IRC client for macOS — built with Swift and SwiftUI.

Brygga is in early development. The core client works end-to-end (connect, join, send, receive, persist) but many features you'd expect from a mature IRC client are still missing.

The name

Brygga (Swedish, /ˈbrʏɡːa/ — roughly BRUEG-ah, with the y pronounced like German ü or French u) is the Swedish word for a pier, jetty, or gangway — the wooden walkway that connects the shore to a boat. A fitting name for a client whose job is to be the plank you walk across to reach the IRC networks on the other side.

The same word also means to brew as a verb (as in beer), which is a nice coincidence given IRC culture.

Requirements

• macOS 15 Sequoia or later (looks best on macOS 26 with Liquid Glass materials, but falls back gracefully to the standard .bar / .thinMaterial / .regularMaterial surfaces on earlier releases)
• Apple Silicon (arm64) for the official DMGs. Intel (x86_64) is source-compatible but not shipped — see Building for Intel Macs to compile your own.
• Xcode 26 or later (for building from source)
• Swift 6.0+

Download

Brygga ships on two tracks:

• Stable — latest release. Cut manually from a v* tag; changes infrequently. Use this unless you want the cutting edge.
• Nightly — releases/tag/nightly. Rebuilt on every push to main; the tag is deleted and recreated each time so the URL is always current. Marked prerelease. Expect rough edges between commits.

Either way, grab the .dmg, drag Brygga.app to /Applications, then right-click → Open on first launch (the binary is ad-hoc signed, not Developer-ID notarized).

If Gatekeeper refuses to open it even after right-click → Open (e.g. "Apple could not verify Brygga is free of malware"), strip the quarantine attribute once and retry:

xattr -cr /Applications/Brygga.app

Building

# Library + executable
swift build

# Run tests
swift test

# Produce a runnable .app bundle at build/Brygga.app
./Scripts/build-app.sh

# Launch
open build/Brygga.app

A raw swift run Brygga launches the binary as a background process — it will not open a window. Always run the built .app bundle.

Building for Intel Macs

Official DMGs are Apple Silicon only. The source has no Apple-Silicon-specific dependencies, so you can produce a working Intel (x86_64) binary yourself — there's just no prebuilt artifact shipped by the project. No CI coverage either, so it's best-effort.

Requirements: macOS 15 Sequoia or later (Intel Macs still on macOS 15's compatibility list), Xcode 26 / Swift 6.2 toolchain.

On an Intel Mac — the normal flow already targets x86_64:

swift build -c release
./Scripts/build-app.sh release
open build/Brygga.app

Cross-compile from Apple Silicon — override the host triple:

swift build -c release --triple x86_64-apple-macosx15.0
# then build the .app around the cross-compiled binary manually:
mkdir -p build/Brygga.app/Contents/MacOS build/Brygga.app/Contents/Resources
cp .build/x86_64-apple-macosx/release/Brygga build/Brygga.app/Contents/MacOS/Brygga
cp Resources/AppIcon.icns build/Brygga.app/Contents/Resources/AppIcon.icns
# then copy an Info.plist from Scripts/build-app.sh's heredoc by hand,
# or tweak build-app.sh to point at the x86_64 artifact path

We don't test Intel builds in CI, so if something breaks on x86_64 specifically, please open an issue with the full build output. Bugs will be fixed when reasonable; platform-specific workarounds won't be.

Current capabilities

Brygga already covers everything a mIRC daily-driver expects, minus DCC and the mIRC scripting language. A non-exhaustive summary:

• TLS-by-default on 6697 via Network.framework, auto-reconnect with exponential backoff, outbound flood protection
• SASL EXTERNAL (TLS client certificate), SCRAM-SHA-256 (RFC 7677), or PLAIN — auto-selected based on what the server advertises
• IRCv3 caps: server-time, multi-prefix, userhost-in-names, chghost, account-tag / account-notify, away-notify, invite-notify, batch, chathistory / draft/chathistory, message-tags
• Slash commands: /join, /part, /nick, /me, /msg, /query, /topic, /whois, /away, /invite, /ignore, /notify, /list, /perform, plus raw fallthrough
• Two-column NavigationSplitView with auto-hiding user-list inspector, detachable channel windows (Cmd+Shift+D), pinned favorites (Cmd+1…9), quick switcher (Cmd+K), quick join (Cmd+J), prev/next channel (Cmd+[ / Cmd+]), in-buffer find (Cmd+F), cross-channel find (Cmd+Shift+F), tab nick completion, emoji autocomplete (:smile: → 😄)
• IRCv3 typing indicator (+typing TAGMSG), inline OG / image link previews, mIRC control-code rendering, markdown-style input (*bold* / _italic_ / ~strike~), stable per-nick colors, highlight notifications with Dock badge, per-channel line marker, status bar with live lag, Liquid Glass chrome across chat, sidebar, and windows
• Preferences: show-joins/parts, auto-join-on-invite, link-previews, identity defaults, timestamp format, colorize nicknames, highlight keywords, ignore list, disk logging, saved servers
• Persistence: servers + channels + preferences in ~/Library/Application Support/Brygga, scrollback as JSONL, opt-out plain-text logs under ~/Library/Logs/Brygga/

Full list and what's still on the backlog lives in docs/PARITY.md.

Roadmap

Phase 1 / 2 / 3 of the mIRC parity plan are shipped. Further polish will surface from daily driving the client.

Explicitly out of scope

• DCC file transfer (see PARITY.md for the full "out of scope" list)
• Objective-C or C interop — see AGENTS.md

Architecture

Brygga is split into two Swift Package Manager targets:

• BryggaCore — library. IRC protocol parser, IRCConnection actor (network I/O), IRCSession (@MainActor, wraps the connection and mutates @Observable models), persistence.
• Brygga — executable. SwiftUI views and the @main entry point.

Models (Server, Channel, User, Message) are @Observable and live on the main actor. The actor/@MainActor boundary is crossed via AsyncStream for incoming IRC messages and connection state changes.

Configuration lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Brygga/servers.json.

Contributing

See AGENTS.md for the rules AI coding agents (and humans) should follow when working in this repo.

The mIRC feature-parity plan — what's in scope, out of scope, and in what order — lives in docs/PARITY.md.

License

BSD 3-Clause. See source file headers.