#ircrc is surprisingly nice and easy to use
all channels being in the same window is actually a feature for me because I can keep up with all the activity and if I want to focus on a single channel, I can just open a new rio window where I grep through the previous window's text file (although I haven't used that much because there wasn't enough traffic to necessitate it)

and with a bit of extra scripting maybe I could have the new windows send messages to specific channels?