Recently I started using empathy as an IRC client on Ubuntu. As per the reviews and the official documentation , empathy is currently not a very good irc client. It has some bugs, recently I too reported a bug regarding change of nick in empathy.

So, I switched over to xchat-gnome , a gnome irc client. It has a decent UI and is full of features, which are currently lacking in empathy. I found that xchat-gnome picks up proxy setting from the previous client. I would not say that it picks up the gloabl settings but from the previous client (atleast in my case).

This pagegives some understanding about how you can change the proxy setting, though its not very clear .Another article , here explains how it can be done very easily. A total of 7 variables might have to be modified to give you the proxy configuration you desire. net_proxy_auth = net_proxy_host = net_proxy_pass = net_proxy_port = net_proxy_type = net_proxy_use = net_proxy_user =

The conclusion is that xchat-gnome does not have a GUI for proxy settings, but it does support proxy.

Update: I have found an alternate way to modify xchat-gnome settings. This method uses editing the configuration file directly in the text editor.

You need to cd to the .xchat2 hidden folder and sudo gedit xchat.conf . In this file you can find all the settings listed and you can edit them as per requirements. The description of each of these variables is available at official documentation.

Cheers!!