Using spmenu on macOS
NOTE: This article is out of date and should no longer be considered accurate information. Read at your own risk.
spmenu (sort of) supports macOS. This is done through an X11 implementation for macOS called XQuartz. It requires some extra effort however.
Install Homebrew
Start by installing Homebrew (the package manager) on your Mac. From there run:
brew install libxft libxinerama xquartz libconfig libx11 freetype
. Make sure
Xquartz is set up and functional before proceeding.
Editing the buildconf
NOTE: The following instructions only apply to users of spmenu 1.0 and greater. Previous versions require a significant amount of work to get running.
The buildconf is just a shell script that the build script (build.sh) reads. So
if we want to append any options we simply edit this file. First we need to set
PREFIX
to /usr/local
instead of the default /usr
. This is because Apple
as of macOS 10.15 Catalina no longer allows us to write to /usr/bin
and
/usr/share
. This avoids any Permission denied
errors you may get (yes, even
with sudo)
Now we need to set pango=false
, pangoxft=false
, imlib2=false
and
openssl=false
. Currently, these features are not supported on macOS.
Should've installed a better operating system, bud.
Compiling and installing
Now that we've edited our buildconf, we can simply run sudo ./build.sh
.