How to compile Textual (open source IRC client) on Mac OS X

Textual is a heavily modified fork of LimeChat and looks and feels more native and light-weight than most other IRC clients for Mac OS X. Further, it doesn’t seem to have problems with window refreshing as observed with XChat Aqua/Azure (App Store link) and XChat for X11 (installed/compiled using ‘brew install xchat’).

Though Textual is also available in the App Store for 4.99 USD, I wanted to compile it from sources myself.

Here’s how to build Textual from sources (tested on Mac OS X Mountain Lion):

  1. Download and install Xcode 4 from the App Store.
  2. Download/checkout the latest Textual sources from https://github.com/Codeux/Textual
  3. Open the file Main Project (Textual).xcodeproj in Xcode.
  4. In Xcode’s Preferences -> Downloads -> Components, install the Command Line Tools.
  5. In the opened project in Xcode, disable code signing:
    For the target Textual, navigate to the tab Build Settings. In the “Code Signing” section, set “Don’t Code Sign” for “Debug” and “Release”.
  6. On the top left of the Xcode IDE window, select the scheme Textual (Standard Release) -> My Mac 64-bit
  7. Click on the “Run” button to start building the project
  8. The “Textual” app will be built in the subfolder “./Build Results/Release/” of your Textual source directory