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Installing mwptools on MacOS#

OS requirements#

A version of MacOS supporting homebrew, e.g.

Apple Silicon#

  • Sequoia
  • Sonoma
  • Ventura

X86_64#

  • Sonoma
  • Ventura

At the time of writing, Homebrew does not officially support Sequoia for (most of) the packages required, however, the required packages (and mwp) work well on Sequoia / X86_64.

Install HomeBrew#

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

or use the official package from the Homebrew release area.

Dependencies#

brew install gtk4 \
 libshumate \
 libsoup \
 git \
 meson \
 libadwaita \
 libsecret \
 vala \
 protobuf-c \
 libpaho-mqtt \
 gstreamer \
 go \
 espeak-ng \
 vte3 \
 librsvg \
 adwaita-icon-theme \
 sdl2 \
 readline \
 gnuplot

Note: homebrew does not supply the librsvg VAPI (vala API) files. It will be necessary to build it from sources (or copy the files from a Linux box, or use docs/librsvg-2.0.vapi.tar.zst).

brew install bash-completion

Blueprint compiler#

The required blueprint-compiler is not in homebrew, so is install locally by the mwp build script.

Build mwp#

Only local install is "supported".

  • Clone the repository
  • cd mwptools
meson setup _build --buildtype=release --strip --prefix=~/.local
ninja -C _build install

One off post install#

  • It is necessary to add $HOME/.local/bin to $PATH
  • mwp's gsettings does not work on MacOS (or more strictly, it does, but mwp and gsettings do not share storage, which is not helpful). Therefore mwp is using an ini file backend on MacOS. A default ini file will be installed on first use.
  • To set settings outside of mwp, you may edit ~/.config/mwp/mwp.ini with care as there is no error checking.
  • Install mwp.app. This adds mwp to Finder etc. 
    cd /Applications
tar -xf <PATH TO>/mwptools/docs/mwp.app.tar.gz

Other notes#

On Ventura, the menus may behave strangely, to the point of being almost unusable. This may be mitigated by setting the environment variable MWP_MAC_NO_NEST (to anything).

libsrecret and other Dbus related services are not available.

mwpset is recommended to edit mwp's gsettinngs.