It just got awesomer. My main problems with the IRC client built into Opera was:
it's not a monospaced font
on my screen it's hard to read the timestamps
the way opera "highlights" messages where my name is mentioned scares me.
but apparently the IRC and Mail clients are both styled with CSS, and it's really easy to change the CSS on those! Now I have my IRC my way, and I made a few color tweaks on the mail, too.
o.o Doods you can make colored or bold text, too. But you don't press Ctrl+K you have to right click the message box. There's a few menus at the bottom that have text formatting options.
Jet fuel can't make dank memes.