Once you get the hang of IRC you will find an IRC Client is much better to use. Here is some help setting up the most common ones

Setting up X-Chat is fairly straight forward. However it is important to note that if you are on Windows, you will need X-Chat-WDK which is open source and free.

Sadly, I don't use mIRC, and it isn't free so I cannot test out, however if someone uses mIRC they can write this in

• X-Chat Azure (Free)
• Textual IRC Client (or if you are feeling daring compile it your self from source using xcode)

• Linux: apt-get install xchat, pacman -S xchat, yum install xchat, or emerge -av xchat.

I will assume you know how to configure this further, as you are probably pretty experienced in such matters