I’m loving Kate but as I’m getting older I find myself having a harder time reading the in-active tabs of each open file. I’ve posted a suggestion in making it adjustable but I’m suspecting that my request will not be handled this week and I’m in for a bunch of php work. 
What I’m considering is to get the source and implement a change that works for me, and who knows maybe even adjustable for others, rather than just hard code it for me, if it’s not too hard. 
My issues are that 1) I’m on a Mac (Ventura) and don’t know what is involved in compiling on it, though if it is a simple matter of ./configure & make I would be able to run that. But then we hit point 2) knowing the environment vars needed to compile on a modern Mac Studio, I’m so lost.
Any pointers you could give me that would give me an overview of what’s involved would be also be greatly appreciated! I’m sure many devs are using Mac’s and know it very well. (I used to use Linux, then FreeBSD so it’s not all new, I just never learned C/C++ though I did compile the Linuz kernel a few times.) 
Thanks,