Textual, the native macOS IRC client that Codeux Software has built and looked after since 2010, has a new home, and the home is us. The full announcement, covering licences, the Mac App Store situation, data handling and the questions we expect, is on the Textual site, which we now run. This post is the other half: why a hosting and software company would take over a fifteen-year-old open source Mac app in a protocol most of the industry wrote off a decade ago.
The short version is that we never left.
We have been on IRC the whole time
The people who make up Blendbyte have been on IRC for over twenty years, which is longer than the company has existed. We were there when everyone went to Slack, we were there when everyone went to Discord, and we are still there now, because for a small distributed engineering team nothing else has quite matched a protocol that is open, scriptable, runs on anything, and does not change its pricing model every eighteen months.
That is not nostalgia. It is operational. Since 2020 we have run ZNCHost, a managed IRC bouncer service on our own infrastructure, which currently keeps more than a hundred active services connected across more than two hundred IRC networks from eight datacenter locations. We know what IRC traffic looks like at three in the morning, we know which networks have interesting opinions about connection limits, and we have spent a reasonable amount of our lives thinking about message buffers.
And for well over a decade, the client sitting on our own Macs has been Textual.
What actually happened
After nearly fifteen years, Codeux Software archived the Textual repository and announced its retirement. That is a long time to carry a piece of software more or less single-handedly, and nobody could reasonably hold it against them. But we were still using it every day and had no intention of stopping.
So we did what you do with open source software you depend on: we forked it. The fork was called textwerk, and we put quite a few updates into it. We were not angling for anything. We were maintaining our own IRC client because the alternative was not having one.
Codeux noticed. Rather than let the original quietly rot while a fork carried on beside it, they got in touch and asked whether we would take Textual itself. We said yes before they had finished asking. textwerk is now being folded back into Textual where it belongs, and if you were using it, you will be moved across with everyone else.
This is a handover from a maintainer to the people who had already picked up the work. It is not an acquisition in any sense that would interest a lawyer, and nobody is being integrated into anything. It is closer to being handed the keys to the pub you have been drinking in since your twenties, after you had already started doing the washing up.
What does not change
Textual stays Textual. Same name, same domain, same #textual on Libera Chat. The website itself has had a refresh, which you will have noticed if you came here from it, but it lives where it always did. It stays open source under the BSD licence it has always had, now at github.com/blendbyte/Textual, with the old Codeux-Software URLs redirecting there. It stays a native Mac app built by people who use it every day, which is the whole point of Textual and the reason we wanted it rather than any alternative.
Existing Textual 7 licences remain valid under the terms of the original purchase. If you use the Mac App Store version, keep a backup of your installed copy; the details are in the announcement.
One thing we want to say plainly, because it is what people quietly worry about when software changes hands: no customer data came with this. No names, no email addresses, no purchase history, no activation logs. That was Codeux's condition and it was ours too. Textual's licensing has always been cryptographically signed and verified locally by the app, which is why a licence keeps working without anyone needing a database of who bought it. The checkout and licence systems we are building are new, run by us, and GDPR applies to them whether we like it or not. If you have never bought anything from us, we have nothing about you.
What is coming
Textual 8. Same codebase, same app, brought up to date, in roughly this order.
First, the foundations. It has to run cleanly on current macOS and keep doing so as Apple ships new versions, and the separate frameworks and helper projects Textual accumulated over the years get folded back into one codebase that is easier to look after. This is invisible from the outside, but it is what makes everything after it possible without one person having to hold the whole project in their head.
Second, catching up with IRC itself, which did not stand still while Textual was quiet. IRCv3 has brought message tags, chat history, read markers, replies, reactions and better account handling. Textual supports some of the earlier work, and we intend to catch up properly.
Third, the long tail of annoyances. We have used Textual daily for over a decade, so we have our own list, and we expect you have yours. Those get fixed.
Then, and only then, the fun part. Some of it to make IRC friendlier to newcomers, because the network only survives if new people keep arriving, and some of it for the long-timers. Everything that makes Textual feel like Textual stays.
One practical note: Textual 8 will be signed by us rather than by Codeux Software, so the built-in updater cannot install it on its own. When 8 is ready, Textual 7 will tell you where to get it, and Textual 8 will offer to bring your servers, settings and history across on first launch, entirely on your Mac. You should not have to set anything up twice.
What this means if you are a Blendbyte client
Nothing. Your hosting, your retainer and your projects are unaffected. Textual is a small, self-contained project with its own community, and it will be looked after by the same people, in the same way we look after the open source packages we already maintain. If anything, it is a reasonable signal about how we treat software we take responsibility for.
Come and say hello
#textual on Libera Chat, same as it has been for years. Whether you have been there since version 2 or are wondering what IRC even is, that is where the conversation happens.
Thank you to Codeux Software, and to Michael Morris behind it. Fifteen years is a long time to look after something for other people, and handing it over carefully rather than switching off the lights is the part most people never see.
