Soft brains

Install Octave on Mac OS X 10.9. Jul 13 th, 2014. Recently I am working on Stanford Machine Learning Course By Andrew NG on Coursera, Andrew recommended Octave to build prototype quickly. It’s been tricky to install octave on Mac, so I shared my process of intalling it. The new GNU Octave 4.0.1 was released March 23, 2016. I would like to find some standard way to install it in El Capitan (mine OS X 10.11.3) because it has significantly better support in some fun. Octave.app is a project to bundle and distribute GNU Octave as a native Mac GUI application. This makes it easy to install and use GNU Octave on Mac. GNU Octave is a language for scientific and numeric programming. We are not an official GNU project or part of GNU Octave.

1. Octave Mac Os Sierra
2. Mac Os Download
3. Octave Mac Os Catalina

On macOS systems GNU Octave can be installed by:

1. macOS App Bundles 'Octave.app' (a single dmg-file)
2. macOS package managers.

Octave Mac Os Sierra

macOS App Bundles[edit]

The Octave.app project provides an unofficial ready-to-use, drag-and-drop macOS App installer based on Homebrew (see below).

A very old installer is hosted on SourceForge.

• macOS App Bundle of Octave 4.0.3 (with GUI) (OS X 10.9+)

Mac Os Download

Package Managers[edit]

All package managers below are given in alphabetical order. The Octave developers do not recommend a certain package manager.

Homebrew[edit]

→ Link to Octave package there.

Homebrew was written 2009 by Max Howell and has gained popularity in the Ruby on Rails community and earned praise for its extensibility.

Install GNU Octave using Homebrew:

1. Install Xcode via the Mac App Store.
   • Install the Command Line Tools by opening a terminal and type
2. Follow Homebrew's installation instructions.
3. Ensure brew itself has the latest definitions
4. Install Octave ^[1]

Further reading[edit]

The default charting package in Octave is straight qt. However, on the Mac gnuplot often works better. To switch to gnuplot, place the following text in your ~/.octaverc file:

Note: If brew complains about:

This is telling you the user permissions for ghostscript are not setup in a way that your user profile can use. You need to change those permissions to your user profile.The following command will repair the issue:

Then run the brew install octave command again.

Note: If brew complains about not having a formula for octave, the following command should fix it:

The command below upgrades Octave and its dependencies to the latest Homebrew-supported versions:

Octave has a built-in GUI (developed using Qt lib) installed by default so that gnuplot and other tools can use it directly. This GUI is always installed when installing Octave using Homebrew.

In case of trouble, see the Homebrew Troubleshooting Guide, which assists in diagnosing problems and craft useful bug reports. Bugs may be reported at Homebrew-core's issue tracker.

MacPorts[edit]

→ Link to Octave package there.

MacPorts, formerly called DarwinPorts, was started in 2002 as part of the OpenDarwin project, with the involvement of a number of Apple Inc. employees including Landon Fuller, Kevin Van Vechten, and Jordan Hubbard.

Install GNU Octave using MacPorts:

1. Install Xcode via the Mac App Store.
   • Install the Command Line Tools by opening a terminal and type
2. Follow MacPorts' installation instructions.
3. Update your installation
4. Install Octave

Spack[edit]

→ Link to Octave package there.

Spack is a package management tool that supports the installation of multiple versions of software on macOS and other operating systems. It was created 2013 by Todd Gamblin and is currently being updated and developed by a large list of contributors (mainly via GitHub).

Install GNU Octave using Spack:

1. Install Xcode via the Mac App Store.
   • Install the Command Line Tools by opening a terminal and type
2. Follow Spack tutorial.
3. Update Spack by going to the local Spack repository (develop branch) folder and run
4. Install Octave
5. To use Octave we need to first load the package

In case of trouble, please visit the Spack repo issues list, and browse through Octave related issues by writing is:issue octave in the filters box.

Create a launcher app with AppleScript[edit]

Open the 'AppleScript Editor' application and write the following text in the editor window:

(e.g. Homebrew installs Octave to /usr/local/bin/octave by default) or if Octave is in your default path:

Octave Mac Os Catalina

or if you wish to start the GUI by default, without a terminal:

Then:

• Select 'Save as ...' from the 'File' menu
• In the menu that appears, select 'Application' from the 'File format' menu, then navigate to the 'Applications' folder and save your script there as 'Octave.app'

To change the application icon:

• Open this link in a web browser, right-click and select 'copy image'.
• Select 'Octave.app' in the Finder, then press command-i to bring up the file info dialog.
• In the file info dialog, select the icon (in the top left) and press command-v to paste the Octave icon over it.

See also[edit]

• Octave for macOS (outdated) contains old installation instructions.

Footnotes[edit]

1. ↑Homebrew has updated some of its scripts. To install Octave as of May 14, 2020, provide the migrated full path by running brew install homebrew/core/octave instead. [Citation needed!]