Building and Geomview under Mac OS X

10.15 Sequioa users:

The obsolete version of Aqua Tcl/Tk included with Mac OS X from version 12 onwards is no longer functional, so you will need to install your own version of Tcl/Tk from source. That is the X11 version, so menus are in individual windows, rather than in the shared Mac menubar. The state of Tcl/Tk on the Mac has been described.

Because this is the X11 version of Tcl/Tk, it needs to talk to an X display, such as XQuartz. You will need to set XQuartz to open at login, and allow it to run in the background so that it can accept an X display connection from SaVi. These are turned on in System Settings: Login Items & Extensions.

Geomview cn be installed under homebrew, but crashes on launch.

10.11 El Capitan, 10.10 Yosemite and 10.9 Mavericks users:

When you type make you will be prompted to install Xcode. You can also install Xcode by typing the terminal command xcode-select --install
Apple no longer includes X11 in Mac OS X. If your compilation fails with an Xlib not found error, install XQuartz to get X11 headers under /opt/X11, and then type:
CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/X11/include
make ARCH=macosx

10.7 Lion, 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.4 Tiger users:

The latest SaVi release and development code (18 December 2007 and later) runs well under your operating systems, as shown in the screenshot below at end. The -redrawn-menus flag is not required.

10.5 Leopard users:

The latest SaVi 1.4 release requires and automatically invokes the -redrawn-menus flag under 10.5 Leopard to avoid a Tk menu problem.

The following instructions tell you how to install SaVi.

1. Is the gcc C compiler installed? Run Terminal from your Applications/Utilities folder and type which gcc to find out.
2. If /usr/bin/gcc isn't returned, you will need to install Apple's developer tools to get the gcc compiler and Tcl/Tk.

   As of Mac OS X 10.7 and later, Xcode is now an app available from the Mac App Store. As well as downloading and installing the Xcode app, it is necessary to explicitly enable command line tools so that e.g. gcc is available. The command line tools must be selected in:
   

   Xcode > Preferences > Downloads > Components > Command Line Tools

   Older versions of Mac OS X can install Xcode from a CD that came with your Mac (says this FAQ) or download the Xcode dmg from Apple Developer Connection, where you can also set up a free account. You'll need the right version of Xcode for your OS; for 10.4 it's Xcode 2.5. 10.5 uses 3.0, 10.6 uses 3.2, and 10.7 uses Xcode 4.

3. Once you have gcc, you should be able to download SaVi 1.5.1, unpack it with tar xvfz savi1.5.1-release.tar.gz (if Safari has uncompressed the file tar xvf suffices) and then:
   cd savi1.5.1
make ARCH=macosx

It is possible to download ActiveTcl and build with that; see the hints in src/Makefile_defs_macosx

Mac-specific problems are discussed in detail in the BUGS textfile.