Old-school IRC.
Brand-new Mac.
Textwerk is a friendly fork of Textual, the chat app you already know, dusted off and rebuilt to feel right at home on today's Mac.
Free and open source · macOS 26 or later
Everything you need.
None of the junk.
All the power Textual was famous for, wrapped in an interface you can run start to finish from the keyboard.
Connect
Modern IRC, done right
Speaks fluent IRCv3, connects over native IPv6, and signs in with SASL (a secure login method many networks now require). Modern servers, zero fuss.
Client certificate auth
Log in with a client TLS certificate, safely tucked away in the modern macOS Keychain.
Bouncer-friendly
Plays nicely with ZNC, plus SOCKS4, SOCKS5, and HTTP proxies, with or without TLS.
Feel at home
Light & dark, natively
A crisp interface with matching light and dark looks that follow whatever your Mac is wearing.
Inline media
Links to YouTube, GitHub, Reddit, Spotify, and a dozen other services unfurl into safe preview cards right in the conversation, never an embedded player or injected script. Toggle each service on or off in Preferences.
Spoken messages
Let your Mac read the room out loud with built-in text-to-speech, now on AVSpeechSynthesizer.
Power tools
Make it yours
Theme it with plain web standards and write addons in Swift, Objective-C, Python, AppleScript, you name it.
Fast by keyboard
Fuzzy channel search, smart auto-complete, and shortcuts for just about everything keep your hands home.
Filters & ignore rules
Mute the noise with rule-based ignores, filter incoming messages, and tune your highlights just so.
Looks great after dark, too.
A crisp interface with matching light and dark looks that follow whatever your Mac is wearing. Pick a display style, grouped Chat bubbles or the classic one-line-per-message look, and every window follows.
We gave Textual a new lease on life.
The original Textual has retired and gone quiet. So we picked up the torch, pointed it straight at macOS 26, fixed the things that broke, and swept out the cobwebs.
- Fixed for macOS 26
- Squashed the crashes and blank/frozen channel views, including a nasty connection crash macOS 26 introduced, plus a crash when switching theme or style settings.
- Scrollback and Keychain fixes
- Fixed the scrollback history service crashing on every launch, and saved passwords disappearing from Keychain after the rename.
- Updates that actually update
- Sparkle now checks GitHub Releases directly, instead of a placeholder feed that never had anything in it.
- Fresh coat of paint
- Reworked topic bar, no more gradients or drop shadows, an updated default font, taller sidebar rows, and instant theme switching with no fade delay.
- Dead code, gone
- Tossed out the old OTR/Blowfish message encryption, unmaintained crypto nobody should be relying on.
- Tidier Help menu
- Cleared out Help-menu links to Codeux Software's now-defunct FAQ, support, and license pages.
Get Textwerk
Grab a build, drop it in Applications, and you're chatting in about a minute.
1 Download a release
Grab the latest .zip from Releases and unzip Textwerk.app into your Applications folder.
2 Open it the first time
Builds are unsigned, so macOS gets nervous on the first launch. Just right-click the app and pick Open, or clear the quarantine flag from Terminal:
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Textwerk.appSafe to run: this only clears the "downloaded from the internet" flag macOS adds automatically. It doesn't touch anything else.
3 Coming from Textual?
Textwerk spots your old setup on first launch and offers to bring over your servers, channels, and preferences. App Store or standalone, either one works.
Rather build it yourself?
You'll need Xcode 16+ and any valid signing identity, set in Configurations/Build/Code Signing Identity.xcconfig.
git clone https://github.com/bashgeek/Textwerk.git
cd Textwerk
./build.sh