ERC is a powerful, modular, and extensible IRC client for the text editor Emacs.
For documentation and tips go to the ERC homepage at the EmacsWiki. The Savannah project page is here.
Please report bugs to the erc-discuss mailing list.
The latest version is 5.3. You can download it from the GNU ftp server or one of its mirrors. See its README file for installation instructions.
Emacs 22.2 comes with ERC 5.3 ready to use. Just type M-x erc RET.
Some of ERC's modules aren't included with Emacs due to
copyright assignment issues or because they depend on other packages
that aren't part of Emacs. If you use the version of ERC that comes
with Emacs and you'd like to
use BBDB, chess over CTCP,
nicklist windows,
Emacspeak, or
alternative channel list windows in ERC you'll have to download
the erc-5.3-extras
package.
There's also an XEmacs package, but it hasn't been updated to the latest version. It's based on ERC 5.1.2.
ERC uses Git. See the ErcDevelopment page on EmacsWiki for details.
Browse the Git repository.
Nightly development snapshots are also available: erc-latest.tar.gz or erc-latest.zip.