installation

Installation of Bersirc is pretty straight forward. It uses the standard Windowss2000 installer and puts all files into C:\Program Files\Bersirc by default.
At first you will have to agree with the usual liscence agreements before you can continue with the actual installation. During installation you can also choose to install some extra plugins. One of them, a Winamp controller, wich adds a drop down menu from the top bar, and for example a User Guide plugin which explains IRC basics to newbie IRC users, great addition!
Finally, you can decide if you want shortcut icons on the desktop, quicklaunchers, etc. All in all, a clean and easy to use installer.

Usage

At first the interface resembles much that from mIRC. the icon bar under the menu, the taskbar at the bottom. But soon you will fall in love with its interface. Its high color icons, the use of pretty icons in the menu, and overall look in general. It sure is a sexy IRC client to look at. A lot of the GUI is configurable in the options. Besides the usual fonts/color options you can turn on windows in the main GUI that shows the servers you are on, with the channels organised under it, a notify window, a taskbar, for short: for people who like to configure their client as much as possible, you can do at will. In the options you can even configure the way joins, parts, quits and actions look like.

The channel windows work how you would expect them to work. They have the usual popups with the usual commands under it. Ofcourse it only shows the commands you have access to, so kick/ban commands dont clutter up when you are not opped. Selecting text with the left mouse button copies it to the clipboard.

One of the features I like most about Bersirc is its multiserver support. All my connections to the different servers where nicely idented, and with the way the servers and channels are organised in the IRC Server List I can quickly click and see what channel is opened on what server/network.

It's the little things that make a IRC client. For example: For those who sometimes get excess flooded becuase they paste to much lines at the same time: Bersirc has a build in delay when pasting multiple lines... Small detail, but very usefull. Or, rejoin X seconds after a kick, how sweet. As a op in many channels I know how irritated I get to see mIRC's rejoin after kick feature. It makes me ban them right after it.

All in all I can say that working in Bersirc is very intuitive, if you are used to mIRC, you feel right at home in Bersirc. The extra options in the GUI are additions you wished mIRC had added ages ago. You will keep discovering little things like /google you will love.

scripts and plugins

No single client is like you want right out of the box. And this is also true for Bersirc. Logging into channelservice, those aliasses you made to quickly read your notes on the channel's eggdrop bot, etc etc. So at one point in time you are bound to want to add little custom commands yourself.
Looking in the help file of Bersirc did not really helped me a lot. Using the find in help for "command", "alias" "user commands" etc did not gave me back any usefull information. And in the interface I only found a "script editor" entry in the tools menu, which opens a script in notepad. No luck sofar. So, off I go to the client's support channel, #Bersirc on EFnet.
Ofcourse I get laughed at first for using the term "Aliasses", apparently, in Bersirc they are called "procedures". The website http://berscript.com/ found in the topic of #Bersirc did not helped me a lot either unfortunally. It has two tiny scriptlets (example's), and that was basically it. My goal was to make a alias like I use a lot in mIRC: alias /auth /msg myBot AUTH myPassword. This lets me simply login to my bot with only having to type /auth. Well, in the end I found two friendly folks in #bersirc on EFNet to helped me out, and solved my problems with undeclared ServerID's, integers and strings. Yes you heard me right, making a custom alias in Bersirc works a little different then in mIRC ;) The above example in mIRC would need the next code in Bersirc:

procedure auth(text: string);
begin
cmd(CurServer, 'PRIVMSG myBot auth myPassword');
end;

Ofcourse there are still the third party plugins. And thanks to a steady base of "hardcore" Bersirc users, there are actually quite a lot of usefull third party plugins you just have to throw in. The Bersirc website has a page dedicated to third party plugins, here you can find plugins like a server lag monitor, download manager and a spell checker.

conclusion

Do I like this client? Oh yeah I do. It is a great client that suprises you all the time with little handy things that make your online life so much easier. The GUI is in my opinion just plain sexy, but without making it a "smiley into image" type of client, iow, its not overdone. The way the multiserver works is also great, the tree like IRC Server window makes it easy to navigate through your channels and servers.
So, is it all just good then? Unfortunally not... I am absolutley no coder, and to setup some custom commands in Bersirc you almost have to learn how to program. And the documentation in this field is seriously lacking. Hopefully they will work on this aspect, becuase this client absolutely deserves that.
Also other small things, like undocked channel windows will minimize to as well if you minimize the client, or the lack of X shortcuts(I have not seen a script or plugin for this yet). Normally I would say "Make some custom commands then", if it wasnt so hard in Bersirc. After these small things are polished out, it would be a top IRC client. Hopefully the scripting guys will pick this client up as a new platform to play on :)