Finally tried moving from HexChat to https://zoitechat.org/ since the Libera IRC channel for HexChat recommends that fork. After some search-and-replace in the plugin I made I was able to port that over, so I have the client just how I had it before.
I would like to explore more clients in the future but it's nice that I can get more IRCv3 features and bug fixes without having to change how everything works or port my plugins over (assuming the client in question even has plugins.)
There's an emoji picker feature that I assume has some sort of bug causing it to be missing most of the emojis, but it's funny thinking about if it were actually intentional and someone decided that 🍋🟩🍄🟫 is all the food section really needs.
I don't need this because I have Windows Key + Period, but I assume this is here because not every Linux distro will have an emoji picker built in or easy to access by default.