Installing Zim Wiki on OSX

Running programs meant for Linux are hard to run on OSX, especially if they use graphics. This is how I got Zim wiki running on OSX.

Installing Zim as a stand-alone app

After using a Linux computer for 5 years, my work environment changed and I am now using OSX full-time. One addition to my personal productivity suite has been Zim wiki, a personal wiki system made of a bunch of text files and a Python wrapper that I sync between my various machines / partitions using Dropbox. The downside of switching operating systems, I had to get Zim wiki running on OSX.

I took much of my inspiration from the Gnome-wiki page on building GTK for OSX and someone’s earlier blog post for how to package Zim as an app on OSX

My setup:

OSX Yosemite 10.10.3
Zim 0.63
Anaconda Python
Homebrew for package management
XCode 6.2

Here are my series of steps (for OSX Yosemite 10.10.3 and Zim 0.63):

Download the Zim source files from the zim downloads page
Make sure you have XCode, svn, git, curl, and OpenSSL installed. My package manager is Homebrew and I installed it with those, but people use different things. From here, the instructions are basically taken from the guide for setting up GTK for OSX
Download gtk-osx-build-setup.sh in your home directory and run it
```
 sh gtk-osx-build-setup.sh
```
In general, I prefer not to mess with environment variables, especially the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH, since I don’t want to mess up my work environment, and don’t want to have to keep track of changing them when I run Zim. So, my solution does not involve changing any of those variables.
This will install jhbuild, but it is installed in ~/.local/bin/jhbuild. So make an alias for the jhbuild command by adding this to your .bashrc or .bash_profile or .zshrc:
```
 alias jhbuild="~/.local/bin/jhbuild"
```
Run jhbuild bootstrap at the command line
Run jhbuild meta-gtk-osx-bootstrap
Run jhbuild build meta-gtk-osx-core
Run jhbuild build meta-gtk-osx-themes
Run jhbuild build meta-gtk-osx-python
Run jhbuild build pygtk.
If all of the jhbuild commands run without a problem, you should be good to go to set up a stand-alone app. Of course, there are many ways for them to go wrong, but if you want help with those feel free to leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll try to help. From here the instructions come from a blog post about how to create a stand-alone Zim app. First, download Platypus. It is a program that can be used to bundle apps on OSX.
Run Platypus and change the parameters as follows:
- App Name: Zim
- Script Type: Bash
- Script Path: click “New” below the path, then replace echo 'Hello, World' with ../Resources/zim-0.63/zim.py
- Output: none
- Identifier: default
- Author: default
- Version: 1.0
- Uncheck all 4 options (including “remain running after initial execution”)
- Click the + sign for “Files to be bundled” and add the source folder for the Zim source.
- If you want the icon for Zim, then you can drag the zim.png file from the zim-0.63/data/ directory into where the icon is

Click Create to create your app, and save it anywhere (the Desktop is a nice place.)

Drag your new icon into the Dock, and you can click it to launch Zim!

I haven’t yet figured out how to get the tray icon working - I suspect I am missing a GTK plugin to build with jhbuild, so if you figure it out, I am excited to know!

I had two main errors (with jhbuild) that I was able to fix, and there are many more that can happen. I will describe my two errors here, and if you have others, feel free to post in the comments / email me and I’ll update this with more.

Error 1: `libxml2`, or in general missing packages.

During some parts of the jhbuild process I kept running into errors where I was missing packages when they clearly were there. This is most likely because jhbuild is not building or linking the packages with the correct version of Python or GTK. To solve this, when an error comes up, I selected 4 from the terminal menu (i.e. open a jhbuild shell), then cd into the Python-2.7.8 directory, and do:

make
make install 

Then exit the shell with exit, and continue the build process. (Reference from this forum post).

Error 2: `libgtk-quartz-2.0.0.dylib`

After I finished all the jhbuild compiling without errors, I ran into an error after packaging, where I would open Zim, but every “wrong”” movement such as random mouse clicks, backspaces too vigorously, or clicking some buttons would crash Zim horribly with the error that libgtk-quartz-2.0.0.dylib plugin failure.

What fixed this for me was changing the default Python expected by Zim to Anaconda Python. The path for my Anaconda Python is in /Users/mprat/anaconda/bin/python, while all the .py files in the Zim source were expecting to use Python from /usr/bin/python, as set by Linux. So I opened the Zim source files in Sublime and changed all the #!/usr/bin/python to #!/Users/mprat/anaconda/bin/python, and re-packaged the app with Platypus. After that, no libgtk-quartz-2.0.0.dylib problems.

I hope this helps anyone else struggling to install Zim on their OSX machines!