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

7 Replies to “How to compile Textual (open source IRC client) on Mac OS X”

  1. Hello,

    I am the developer of Textual. While everything in this post is fine, I would like to state that disabling code signing will create issues within the application since it relies on the sandbox. Stuff such as logging will be broken and unusable.

    The application is not very expensive so I suggest purchasing it.

    — Michael

    1. Michael,

      Is there a way to build the application without breaking any of its functionality? I feel like there should be since you did opensource the project.

  2. 2 things needed to be changed in order to compile without code signing in mavericks.

    1st. Project properties -> under “Build Settings” select “All” and “Levels”
    Then select (for all phases) “Don’t Code sign” (you won’t be able to change Config.File, but don’t worry about that)
    2nd. Source-Code -> Preferences -> Resource Management -> TPCResourceManager.m
    change “sourePath = [TPCPreferences systemUnsupervisedScriptFolderPath]; ”
    to “sourePath = [TPCPreferences applicationSupportFolderPath];”

    Enjoy…

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