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Andy Young edited this page Dec 17, 2025 · 6 revisions

This page contains some information about how I have set up my Mac. I use Homebrew as my package manager. You can then use this to install almost all of the research software you'll need, expect for specialist packages.

These are the main packages I have then installed.

  • Microsoft Visual Studio Code installed with brew install --cask visual-studio-code.
  • A terminal emulator such as
    • iterm2 installed with brew install --cask iterm2.
    • ghostty installed with brew install --cask ghostty
  • Julia which you can install via juliaup which keeps your version of Julia up-to-date, installed with brew install juliaup.
  • If you need a LaTeX distribution you could usd mactex but you might not need this if you're using Overleaf, for example. Installed with brew install --cask mactex.
  • You can install the Matrix collaboration client element with brew install --cask element.

HEASOFT / XSPEC

I have installed HEASOFT on my Mac, which includes XSPEC, by following the instructions for Installing HEASoft on a Mac.

N.B. I had to uninstall and reinstall the Xcode command line tools by following the instructions for Installing the command-line tools.

Also, because I am using Homebrew installed python I had to run things in my own virtual environment (in the following example I am insatlling things in the /Users/phajy/Software folder.

python3 -m venv /Users/phajy/Software
source /Users/phajy/Software/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install "astropy[recommended]"

export CC=/usr/bin/clang
export CXX=/usr/bin/clang++
export PERL=/usr/bin/perl
export FC=/opt/homebrew/bin/gfortran-14
export PYTHON=/Users/phajy/Software/bin/python

export PATH="/usr/bin:$PATH"
cd heasoft-6.36/BUILD_DIR/
./configure --with-png=/opt/homebrew > config.txt 2>&1
make > build.txt 2>&1
make install > install.txt 2>&1

export HEADAS=/Users/phajy/Software/heasoft-6.36/aarch64-apple-darwin24.6.0
source $HEADAS/headas-init.sh

To get PyXspec working I had to make sure that PYTHON_INC and PYTHON_LIB were set correctly in the hmakerc file (see Build and Install PyXspec instructions) which, for me, was as follows.

PYTHON_INC="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/python@3.13/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.13/include/python3.13"
PYTHON_LIB="-L/opt/homebrew/opt/python@3.13/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.13/lib -lpython3.13"

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