I seem to remember, back in '91 or so, that the console-based IRCII implemention on the Solaris box that first got me on the net would let me /Join multiple channels on a given network such that, as new channels were joined, they would start scrolling to the single console view. Let's call it the 'interleaved conversation' chat paradigm. Am I rembering this correctly? More importantly, is there a modern way of doing this in any of the GUI-based clients?

I'm surprised this isn't a common desire/feature because I think it would greatly improve the experience, especially on channels with high SNR. For example, If I'm working on a project I may connect to Freenode and join : #Qt,#OpenGL,#C++. As it is now, with mIRC,Xchat, I have to manually flip between pages just to see whats being said and to reply.

What I envision would go more like this (using only 2 channels for simplicity)

>/join #QT #OpenGL

< [QT] QtChannelUser: Hello TwoPixelGrid.
< [OpenGL] OpenGLChannelUser: Hi there TwoPixelGrid.

> @QT: Hi QtChannelUser
> @OpenGL: Hello againOpenGLChannelUser
> And this message is going out to all my channels.

Do I have to write a new client or is this already out there?