Joining Channels
Once you have connected to a server and the console window is online, you can join a channel. 

Snak supports the /join and /channel commands, but it also provides quicker, more user-friendly ways of joining channels.

To join a channel using the input field in either the console window or an existing channel window, type /join or /channel followed by the channel name. 

Joining automatically
If you find yourself joining the same channels every time you log onto IRC, it may save you some time to tell Snak to automatically join the channels when it connects.

To do so, open the Connection record and type /join <channelname> (without the brackets)   in the startup actions field. There can only be one command per line, but the field can accept multiple lines.

Another way is to save a setup file as described in the previous chapter.

Joining manually
The easiest way to join channels is to use the File/Join menu or the cmd-J menu shortcut. 

That will open the Join channel dialog where you can enter the name of the desired channel. This dialog also contains a list of frequently used channels, from which you can join the channels by double clicking on their name. 
To add a channel to the list, type it into the input field and press the Add button.

After you enter the /join command or use the Join channel dialog, a command will be sent to the server that you wish to join the channel. Some channels require a password to access or have limitations on how many users may participate so you may or may not gain entrance.

If the channel requires a password to enter, you will have to type in the command "/join <channel> <password>". 

The channel window comes up when the server responds that you have successfully joined the channel, and then you can engage in normal IRC conversations.

Congratulations : You are now online on the Internet Relay Chat network :-)

If you know other IRC clients you may know that channel names always start with a '#' character. In Snak you may omit that character, since the program is smart enough to add it when necessary.

Getting a channel List
Another way of joining a channel is to ask the IRC server to provide a list of all available channels

To obtain a channel list, use the  File/List Channels menu. 

That will display the List channels dialog where you can set up the criteria for the listing. You can specify that you want to see channels containing certain words but not others. As an example, you can specify that you want to see channels with at least 10 users but not more that 20, whose names contain "windows" but not "rules". 

Pressing OK will send the command off to the server. Be advised that on some servers, the List command will result in so much data being sent to you that the server will disconnect you . . . 

Snak will begin filtering the information  based on the criteria that you specified, as soon as the server responds.

Once a valid channel is found, Snak will open a Channel List window and display the channel name and information.  You can also open this by typing the /list command

You can join a channel from the Channel list by double clicking on the channel entry in the list .

Snak will enable the Save button in the Channel list window when the server is done listing the channels, and then you can save the listing to a file. 

In this picture, the channel list is not yet complete as information is still being received from the server. This is indicated by the rotating arrow. 

The Channel list window supports a Find and Find Again function that will let you search the found channels.