My problem was that I didn't find an easy way to have it connect automatically - I was using Adium in Mac OS. Adium is a multi-protocol chat program, so some of the way it works doesn't fit very naturally with IRC, but I didn't want to run a separate program.

In the past, the best IRC client I could find for OSX was Colloquy [http://http://colloquy.info/]. It's not perfect, but I remember it being quite good in the past.I know you would rather not run a separate IRC client, but Adium really isn't an ideal solution right now, so you might find it better using Colloquy. You can also then hide the chat window (Cmd+H) rather than minimizing it.

It would be nice to have the channel joined and messages logged even if the chat window was closed, but this doesn't seem to be possible in the currently released version (http://trac.adium.im/ticket/12068). Until this is implemented, I plan to just minimize the window.

For message logs, you can always just look at the logs on the Cactus website.

Another thing which might be useful would be to have commit messages automatically posted to IRC whenever a commit is made.

Barry