This release focuses on bringing real-time community chat into the terminal experience, along with a few quality-of-life updates. You can now join rootIRC from multiple entry points and easily open the external changelog from within the terminal.
Introducing rootIRC Chat
rootIRC is now available as an IRC-style chat experience that runs in a full-screen React TUI overlay. It uses your existing profile handle, display name, and styling so your identity is consistent across the terminal and chat.
You can launch rootIRC directly from the terminal with the new chat command or its alias irc. You can also execute rootIRC.exe from the root directory, which opens the same chat overlay for authenticated users.
The terminal now has a dedicated chat mode that hands input over to the React TUI, so typing and navigation feel native while you are chatting. When you exit chat, you are returned to the regular command prompt with your previous terminal context restored.
Chat Data and Presence Backend
Under the hood, new database structures power rootIRC, including channels, channel membership, messages, presence, and moderation actions. These structures support user and system channels, message history, and presence status so that channel lists, user lists, and chat history can load reliably.
Scheduled jobs are defined to archive inactive or low-activity channels and to clean up old messages, which helps keep chat history performant and manageable over time. Chat history and user listing functions now also include handle styling fields, so your premium handle styles appear correctly in chat.
Terminal Commands and Onboarding Updates
A new changelog command is available in the terminal, which prints a short message then opens the external changelog site in a new browser tab. This gives you a quick way to see what has changed without leaving the terminal context.
The help output now shows a dedicated Community section that lists the new chat command so it is easier to discover. After successful authentication, the interactive success screen now suggests chatting with others via rootIRC.exe or chat, and the readme has been updated to highlight rootIRC as the real-time chat option instead of the previous feed concept.
Smoother Command Execution
Script execution in the terminal is more flexible. The exec command now understands a leading ./ prefix and, when no extension is provided, it tries .sh, then .exe, then .bat, before defaulting to .sh, which makes it easier to run scripts and executables without remembering exact filenames.
The command executor also recognizes bare .exe filenames like rootIRC.exe as executable, automatically routing them through exec so they run as expected. Keyboard handling respects the new chat mode by ignoring xterm input while chat is active, which prevents conflicts between the terminal and the chat overlay.
Finally, the splash screen version label has been updated to Root of the Internet v0.4.0 (Closed Beta), reflecting the current state of the product.