irssi VS hexchat

If you don't mind terminal clients, irssi is still regularly updated (most recent version was released in March of this year). It's available with homebrew.

irc client: irssi

I found Irssi which apperantly has the capability to do this but the configuration is more complex than I hoped. While my experiments haven't concluded yet, is anybody aware of an easy to use IRC client that I can use to crawl the messages in an IRC channel?

An IRC bouncer or client

Start off using HexChat for a client. You can find channels here: https://netsplit.de/channels/

This is a bug specific to Python 2 that was already reported on Hexchat's bugtracker and there is a fix that will be part of the next release.

First off, grab yourself an IRC client. On their connection info page Hackint has information for both WeeChat and Hexchat, but you could use any IRC client.

Gajim is for XMPP. For IRC you need Hexchat or Weechat or something like that.

Hexchat is one of the more popular ones.

IRChighway.net with hexchat.github.io

IRC - Also still around and in some cases, the same as it ever was, albeit with a smaller user base. A list of networks can be found here, and while there are many actively developed IRC clients out there, if you don't know where to start, most people recommend HexChat. Reddit's affiliated network is called Snoonet. mIRC is still actively developed by Khaled Mardam-Bey, so by all means, feel free to give that a shot if you are so inclined.