Mac OS X for Physicists

About Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a powerful operating system that combines Unix underpinnings familar to particle physicists and easy-to-use interface of Macintosh. This home page describes how to set up Mac OS X for the use by particle theorists or other physicists.

Install OS

Of course, you must install the operating system first. From the installer, don't choose "Easy Install" but "Customize" it so that X11 (see below) will be installed.

Once you have installed the system from CD-ROM, go to the Apple Menu (the Apple logo at the top left corner of the screen) and choose "Software Update", and keep updating the system until you don't see any more updates. You can skip some updates, if you are dead sure that you will never use Arabic on your machine, or you won't use fancy MP3 player from Apple iPod. But install all of those that are not obviously useless for you.

Xcode

Apple renamed Developer Tools to Xcode. It is a collection of compilers, header files, libraries, and software development tools. You definitely want C compiler so that you can install standard Unix software. The CDs to install Xcode must have come with your system. Xcode is also freely available here if you sign up. Its compiler is a hacked version of gcc to support Objective C. The Xcode is big, though, weighing more than 800MB. Don't attempt a download without a broadband.

TeX

We can't live without TeX. MacTeX TeXnical working group of the TeX Users Group (TUG) created an easy-to-install TeX distribution for for MacOSX. Go to The MacTeX Distribution page to download it.

If you in addition would like to have a Mac-like application that combines the editor and previewer, TeXShop is the way to go. From this web site, you will find other available TeX installations as well.

X Windows

Many Unix applications run in X Windows environment. Apple's implementation of X Windows X11 for Mac OS X uses native graphics engine and is fast. It uses its own window manager that looks just like the rest of Mac Aqua interface. It can be installed from the Tiger system disk. You also need "X11 for Mac OS X SDK" from the Tiger Xcode CD.

If you prefer to use a different window manager, such as KDE or windowmaker, go for XFree86. XFree86 is ported and runs natively on Mac OS X. Go to Building XFree86 on Darwin and Mac OS X to download the whole X Windows package for Mac OS X. You can run X Window clients "rootless", namely side-by-side with other Macintosh applications, or in its separate screen.

Unix applications

A variant of Unix which Mac OS X is based on is called Darwin. Many Unix applications had been ported to Mac OS X already. I like using Fink package manager. It automates the process of downloading the binary package, or downloading source package, applying a patch, compling, and installing it. There is an impressive number of applications you can install via fink. Fink was designed carefully as to not disturb or modify the system. It can be uninstalled with a single command 'sudo rm -r /sw' You definitely want f77, imagemagick, ghostscript for X, ispell, xdvi, and gimp if you want to edit graphics or xv to preview them.

Another source of ported Unix applications is Gnu-Darwin Distribution. It is not as automatic as fink, but it provides a wide collection of ported Unix applications. It does require some tinkering with the system area. Proceed cautiously.

To run commands on a shell, you launch Terminal application from /Applications/Utilities folder.

Emacs

You can emacs on Terminal already out of the box, or xemacs in X Windows available via fink.

I'd recommend using Emacs (GNU Emacs, not xemacs) as a separate application. You can download the Carbon Emacs which has built-in support for SOURCE SPECIALS which you enable from the menu Command → TeXing Options → Source Specials. Then by doing control-click on the xdvi window, the cursor in Emacs moves automatically to the corresponding paragraph. You set an enviromental variable

XEDITOR="/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient --no-wait +%l %f"

in .xinitrc. It also has a built-in support for auctex, LaTeX-aware formatting, that makes editing LaTeX easier. I'd also recommend "M-x flyspell-mode" for on-the-fly spell checking. It requires ispell available through fink.

You can do the same also with xemacs. You set an environmental variable

XEDITOR="gnuclient -q +%l %f"

in .xinitrc, and run "M-x gnuserv-start" in xemacs. You should set

(progn (setq LaTeX-command-style '(("." "latex --src-specials"))));

in ~/.xemacs/init.el to use SOURCE SPECIALS. One annoyance is that xemacs keeps opening a new window each time you control-click on xdvi.

Web Browsers

Mac OS X comes both with Apple's Safari, a Mac-only fast browser based on KDE's Konqueror, and with Internet Explorer preinstalled.

Probably more popular these days is Firefox from Mozilla. It is highly customizable, but doesn't quite look like a Mac app.

Another Mac-only browser OmniWeb is also an excellent alternative that looks just right. It feels snappier and even better than Safari.

The recent versions of Safari can uncompress gzipped Postscript files, convert them to PDF, and display them with Preview application automatically.

High Energy Physics specific tools

Keisuke Fujii, my former collaborator on JLC studies, has ported many useful HEP-specific tools to Mac OS X, including g77, topdrawer, cernlib, available here. Thank you, Fujii-san! Many of them can be installed via fink.

As of this writing (Friday the 13th, Oct 2006), there is no g77 or gfortran for Intel Macs available via fink. Instead, try this link.

Unix servers

Because Mac OS X is Unix, it can run all kinds of servers. To serve mail, Postfix Enabler can turn on SMTP, POP3, and IMAP servers with SSL. To set up mailing lists, GNU Mailman is easy and secure. Remote administration is supported out of the box via VNC. Just go to "Sharing" control panel, and turn on "Apple Remote Desktop." All you need then is a client, such as Chicken of the VNC.

Miscellaneous Applications

Fugu is a graphical sftp client. And the good-'old Fetch now supports sftp. GraphicConverter is a swiss army knife to deal with and edit various graphic formats.

To back up a disk or to migrate from a small hard disk to a larger one, I'd recommend SuperDuper! It is also good for making bootable backups.

To paste equations into PowerPoint or Office, I use tex2im, a nifty shell script that converts equation in LaTeX to any graphics format. It can be installed via fink and uses imagemagick. Unfortunately PowerPoint bitmaps PDF and the result is not scalable. If you choose the size appropriately it looks fine.

Keynote users need only PDF to paste equations and Feynman diagrams. Equation Service and LaTeXiT provide GUI. Keynote uses PDF directly and the result is scalable. You can also create Feynman diagrams with LaTeXiT; see instructions by Taku Yamanaka.

Applications that cost money

Mathematica from Wolfram Research can't be missed. MatLab from The MathWorks is also available for Mac OS X.
The Office suite from Microsoft is available and is much better than previous versions of Office. They finally look like Mac applications!
For presentations, Apple's Keynote is rapidly gaining popularity. It allows PDF graphics without losing scalability, has cool transitions. Steve Jobs himself uses it for MacWorld keynote addresses famous for the "reality distortion field." It is a part of iWork package together with Pages, a combo of a word processor and a page layout program.
All important Adobe applications are there, including Acrobat Reader, Acrobat, Illustrator, PhotoShop.
I haven't had much problem finding good applications for research purposes. People complain that there are still less games available for Macintosh, that may be a good thing.^_^