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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 \
 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).

brew install bash-completion

Blueprint compiler#

The required blueprint-compiler is not in homebrew, so is install locally:

Note: If you have a pre-existing python, then the packages installed above may fail to install the dependency pygobject3 and you will have to install it manually, either via brew or pipx.

git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/jwestman/blueprint-compiler
cd blueprint-compiler/
meson setup _build
sudo ninja -C _build install

Build mwp#

Only local install is "supported".

  • Clone the repository
  • Checkout the development branch (for now)
  • 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#

macOS appears not measure text width in the same was a other OS. A "fudge factor" is included that works on my MacOS VMs. The user set there own value with the environment variable `MWP_MAC_FACTOR', set to a value greater than 100. Try with values around 125.

e.g. 

mwp MWP_MAC_FACTOR=128
Once a suitable value is found:

  • Reset panel sizing rm -f ~/.config/mwp/.paned
  • If required, add the MWP_MAC_FACTOR environment variable to ~/.config/mwp/cmdopts

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.