allow a smaller always-accessible mode viewer/editor such as by topic

[dchmelik]

Is this a feature request?

Yes: allow a smaller always-accessible mode viewer/editor such as by topic, otherwise despite how feature-rich KVIRC is for average chatters, it's often too slow for operators, who may need immediate access to mode-changing (see for example HexChat where each mode can simply be a button beside topic and immediately changed, instead of having to open & close an entire unnecessarily-large modes panel that would be closed for chat then slowest to access in emergencies).

[ctrlaltca]

Nowadays a channel can have a lot of different modes, eg. on Libera.chat currently 24 different modes are available for a channel. No way we're adding all of them to the toolbar.
If you want to create a toolbar button to quickly set/remove a mode, just create an action and enable it for channel windows:

if($str.contains($chan.mode, "i", true)) {
  mode $chan.name -i
} else {
  mode $chan.name +i
}

You can also input modes directly in the "channel modes" textbox by the topic widget.

[dchmelik]

I only care about original (IRCnet/EFnet) modes; not dozens new ones, and even then, only security ones like you mentioned: +i,+m,+s, and maybe that's about it; HexChat only has a small section that says ntimbkl which doesn't take much space, but I guess (except maybe the ones with boxesL k, l) custom buttons should work for this... just tried them and they work very well (though I do rarely use the +k, +l with text/number boxes).