Graphical Mode Links2 on Mac
I consider myself a happy links2^ user. I tend to just use links2 in text mode
but recently, I wanted to see the magic of graphical mode links2. There's just
one issue: I wanted to set this up on my work computer and my work computer is a
Mac.
On my mac, I manage software packages using brew^. The links2 version that
comes with brew works fine, except that it doesn't have support for graphical
mode and there's no option to change this (easily). So I decided to compile it
myself, graphical mode enabled this time. This turned out to be a bit harder
than I expected.
Here are the steps I took to make it work.
1. Install Dependencies
First off, I needed to make sure that the necessary dependencies were available
on my system. This includes libraries to show images, support SSL and run
graphical X11 applications on MacOS. I'm not sure this is the full list since I
probably had some things already installed, but I made sure the following was
available:
brew install pkgconf libpng jpeg libjpeg-turbo libtiff libavif xz xquartz
2. Set up XQuartz as the Graphics Driver
One issue I ran into with installing graphical links2 on my Mac is that while
MacOS has a UNIX subsystem, it doesn't use X11 as its display server. This
didn't used to be a problem because X11 came bundled with MacOS X (v10.5, if I
remember) but that isn't the case anymore.
Luckily, we can work around this by using the excellent XQuartz^ project,
which is based on the original X11 that was bundled with Mac OS X. We have
already installed XQuartz (see step 1), but we also need to run a few more steps
to start it:
launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/org.xquartz.startx.plist launchctl start org.xquartz.startx
Next up, we need to set the `DISPLAY` env so links2 knows how to show itself.
This is admittedly a bit cumbersome to do, so if you know an easier way, please
let me know.
I first find the xquartz socket, which by default is in `/private/tmp`:
$ ls -l /private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.* /private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.5zMznDFBZV: srw-rw-rw- ghost staff 0 B Mon Feb 17 12:36:33 2025 org.xquartz:0
Then, knowing the location of the xquartz socket, we can set `DISPLAY` (it's
best to put this in your `~/.zshrc` or similar):
export DISPLAY=/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.5zMznDFBZV/org.xquartz:0
You can then test if everything is set up correctly by running:
/opt/X11/bin/xeyes
3. Download and Unpack Links2
I just downloaded the latest version from the website^, which ended up being
links-2.30.tar.gz.
curl -O http://links.twibright.com/download/links-2.30.tar.gz tar -xzvf links-2.30.tar.gz cd links-2.30
4. Configure, Make, Make Install
The hard part is over now. We just have to configure, compile and install links2
and hopefully everything will work. This is how I configured it:
./configure --prefix=/usr/local \
--enable-graphics \
--with-ssl=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/openssl@3/3.4.1 \
--x-includes=/usr/X11/include/ \
--x-libraries=/usr/X11/lib/If the above finished without errors, you should see something like this:
creating ./config.status creating Makefile creating config.h --------------------------------------------------------- Configuration results: Event handler: LIBEVENT IPv6: YES Supported compression: ZLIB BROTLI ZSTD BZIP2 LZMA SSL support: OPENSSL UTF-8 terminal: YES GPM support: NO Graphics enabled: YES Graphics drivers: X Font rendering: FREETYPE Image formats: GIF PNG XBM JPEG TIFF WEBP AVIF OpenMP: NO ---------------------------------------------------------
Next we can compile and install it. Keep in mind that due to my `--prefix=`
argument, Links2 will be installed in `/usr/local/bin/`. If you want to install
in a different location, please change this.
make sudo make install
5. Enjoy the Glory of Graphical Mode Links2
/usr/local/bin/links -g
Links2 Graphical Mode on MacOS
Reply via email: ghostzero@ghostze.ro
⁂
Source