Most IRC clients support unicode. Also, I've never had an issue just using an internal pastebin to share code-snippets with other devs. If we needed to work on code together, we would use an application like remote desktop or a shared screen session.
I absolutely cannot see why people still recommend IRC today for work use. It can pretty much only do text for the moment you're online and no we don't have time (money) to hack IRC to meet our needs.
Not inline, but you can share link to the image or send it to other person/persons via DCC directly, that's what you do on IRC.
> Can you rapidly search the history?
Sure, no problems with that, all the channels we use are logged and ready for advanced search.
> Can you customize alerts?
Yes.
> Does it work reliably on mobile?
Works for us.
> You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC?
I already answered that.
> Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?
We don't do that on IRC.
If Slack works for you then great, it doesn't do anything for us. We have different workflow than you, which doesn't mean it's worse, it's just different. We don't need integration with dropbox, intercom etc, because we don't use them and we have IRC integration with tools we use already. We host all our tools and infrastructure and we need to control the whole stack.
I didn't said anywhere that new startup should go with IRC (unless you are already familiar with IRC with your team). I've shared my experience and opinion about IRC. We had infrastructure built around IRC already, we have a lot of experience with IRC and whole team knows IRC very well. I know some other teams that use IRC and they don't have any problems either.
You can always paste a link to an image hosting service and launch the viewer as a separate application. I don't really see why viewing the image in the same application as the rest of the text is seen as an advantage. If it's inline, it would eventually disappear from the screen as more messages are posted.
> Can you rapidly search the history?
I can use grep on the locally stored log files.
> Can you customize alerts?
That depends on the client.
> Does it work reliably on mobile?
The IRC client I have on my Nokia phone works just fine.
> You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC?
Normally, you post a link to an image or pastebin service that shows the problem.
> Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?
You would have to use a separate application for that. FWIW, I use Slack in Firefox and that feature (at least the last time I tried it), didn't work. I had to install chrome to get it to work.
> image service
Now the data is outside, not an option.
> grep logs
How do you tell a designer to use grep on her iPhone? I can't even figure that out myself.
> use other devices for audio / video
And now what is the point of keeping IRC?
> Now the data is outside, not an option.
The company can easily host it's own image service. The one I work for has had one for over a decade.
>> grep logs
> How do you tell a designer to use grep on her iPhone? I can't even figure that out myself.
How do I get a Slack client on my Nokia N9? Contrived examples can work both ways.
Slack is great. I don't need to waste time writing bots because all of the tools I use already have simple integrations: GitHub, Box, DropBox, Intercom, etc. Doing all of that within IRC is a pain. For example: responding to an Intercom conversation from within Slack. I can set up Slack for an org in literally minutes. With IRC? Not literally minutes.