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):
- Download and install Xcode 4 from the App Store.
- Download/checkout the latest Textual sources from https://github.com/Codeux/Textual
- Open the file Main Project (Textual).xcodeproj in Xcode.
- In Xcode’s Preferences -> Downloads -> Components, install the Command Line Tools.
- 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”. - On the top left of the Xcode IDE window, select the scheme Textual (Standard Release) -> My Mac 64-bit
- Click on the “Run” button to start building the project
- The “Textual” app will be built in the subfolder “./Build Results/Release/” of your Textual source directory