How to install Quanta Plus on Mac OS X
Quata is an open source web development tool for the K Desktop Environment, primarily used on Linux. It's stable, user friendly, and does just about anything you could ever dream of as a web developer. Integrated FTP, code folding, highly configurable syntax highlighting and lots of other stuff. For more info, check out the Quanta Plus website.
Quanta might be the best web development application ever developed. I realized this when my Macbook was in for repair, and I had to fall back on good old Linux for two or three weeks. When I got my Macbook back, I really missed Quanta, so I decided to install it on Mac OS X using fink.
This worked out great, and I wrote down the steps I took to get it running.
I did this on Tiger 10.4.7, but the procedure shouldn't differ on earlier versions. There might be some differences between Intel and PPC though. If you're on PPC you might be lucky enough to be able to install pre-compiled binarys, and would thus save a lot of time.
It takes some time to do this since a lot of programs and libraries (KDE amongst other) will have to be compiled, but most if it is automatic, and the whole process is actually really easy! There's only 5 steps you need to go through.
This is possible thank's to these guys. Great work!
Quanta Plus running on Mac OS X
Things you need before continuing:
• X11 for Mac OS X
• XCode with X11 SDK
These are just regular Mac OS X package installers, so you should have no trouble installing them.
Installing Quanta Plus
Step 1. Download fink from http://fink.sourceforge.net. Note that there's two versions, one for Intel and one for PPC. Choose the appropriate one for your platform.
Step 2. Install fink, and FinkCommander, which is found in it's own folder in the fink archive.
Step 3. Open FinkCommander and update the repositories (the folder icon with a green arrow in the toolbar). This will download a list of new packages, and update outdated ones. This will take quite a long while, but is necessary for Quanta Plus to show up in the package list.
Fink is being updated.
Step 4. Now you can search for Quanta and it will show up in the list. Select the quanta package, and install it from source (I'm not sure about PPC, but for intel there isn't a pre-compiled binary version of this). Now fink will download, compile, and install quanta, and all of it's required packages. Since there are a lot of packages to compile, this will take a very long time. For me it took about 3 hrs on a 1.83 Ghz Macbook with 2 GB of ram.
You can accept the default response on all the questions, after that it will continue automatically, so you can do other stuff while it installs.
Quanta in the packages list.
Step 5. Quanta Plus is now installed. To run it, open an X11 terminal and enter quanta.
As this might be a bit inconvenient, you can create an AppleScript that takes care of this for you.
Open the Script Editor utillity and enter do shell script "open /sw/bin/quanta". This will run X11 and open Quanta in it. Save the script as an application bundle.
If you want to have a Quanta icon for it you can right-click on the bundle and show package content. Then put this icon file in the Resources folder (replace the current one).
And boom! Now you got a little Quanta icon that you can put in your dock.
I changed some key mappings in Quanta to be able to save, copy and paste the usual way with commando.
To do this, first turn off "Enable keyboard shortcuts in X11" in the X11 preferences. Then go to Settings->Configure Shortcuts in Quanta. In the widow that pops up you can search for a command you want to change the key-mapping for. This is a lovely feature :)
Now you should have Quanta Plus up and running on your OS X box!
There are a few X11 vs Aqua related bugs though. One that is really annoying, you can't paste clipboard content from Aqua to Quanta. The only work-around I can find for this is to first copy the text to an xterm, and then copy it from the xterm window to Quanta using middle mouse buttun, or alt-click. (Select the text in the terminal and middle/alt-click in Quanta)
If anyone finds a better solution to this problem, feel free to share it in the comments.
Good luck!
Written by Joacim Magnusson