Yorick Installation Instructions
Yorick is open source software. You may use, distribute, or modify yorick under the terms of a BSD license. The source code for yorick is available from the yorick homepage hosted by SourceForge.net.
This Mac OS X binary distribution of yorick is packaged as a gzipped tar archive. It includes the yorick-z and yorick-gl projects as well, which add zlib, png, jpeg, mpeg, and OpenGL support to the yorick interpreter. To install it, you can place this top level directory anywhere you like; reasonable choices are the Applications directory, or your home directory. Yorick is an X11 program, so you need to install and start an X11 server before you can use yorick's interactive graphics (see below). You start yorick from the command line, so you will want to make sure the yorick executable is on your shell's PATH. You can do this in one of two ways:
- Put a symlink to the yorick executable in a directory you know
to be on your PATH, e.g.-
ln -s /Applications/yorick-2.1.04/bin/yorick /usr/local/bin/yorick
(assuming you moved this directory to /Applications). You may also want to make symlinks to gist and yomacs if you do this. - Put the bin/ subdirectory of this directory on your PATH. You would normally do this in your ~/.login or ~/.profile script, depending on what shell you use.
To uninstall yorick, simply delete this directory and undo the changes you made to put yorick on your PATH.
Go to the Getting Started page to begin learning to use yorick.
Apple includes an X11 server with Mac OS X; you need to install it to use X11 software, which includes a large amount of open source software in addition to yorick.
If you want to get the most out of yorick, you will need to install other open source programs on your Mac. The easiest way to do that is to install either Darwin Ports or Fink on your machine. Either one will allow you to easily download and install thousands of open source programs.
GNU Emacs
Emacs is a powerful text editor and terminal emulator, which supports a complete yorick development environment. The emacs that Apple ships (/usr/bin/emacs) is crippled; you need to install an X11 version of emacs from either Darwin Ports or Fink to make it usable. (Things will be easier if you install an X11 version of emacs rather than a native Carbon version. If you try to use the Carbon version, you will need to set the DISPLAY environment variable before you can run yorick.) To start yorick running under emacs, use the yomacs script instead of the yorick executable.
You should also add the following lines to your ~/.emacs Emacs startup file (assuming you moved this directory to /Applications):
(setq yorick-executable-name "/Applications/yorick-2.1.04/bin/yorick") (load "/Applications/yorick-2.1.04/emacs/yorick-auto.el" t t)
With these lines, you can start yorick under any emacs (not just yomacs) with the command M-x yorick RET. Any emacs will also recognize yorick .i files and use appropriate syntax highlighting and other aids for composing yorick source code.
Get GNU Emacs from Darwin Ports or Fink.
Graphics compatibility
Yorick is capable of producing publication quality graphical output. You will need some additional software to take advantage of this. Additionally, I recommend the following yorick commands in order to produce high quality graphical output:
window, style="vg.gs"; /* use viewgraph style */ pldefault, marks=0, width=4; /* no curve markers, wide lines */
Ghostscript
Ghostscript is a PostScript interpreter, which must be present in order for the yorick pdf and eps commands to work. The native hardcopy output format for yorick graphics is postscript, which ghostscript can translate to the eps and pdf formats.
Get Ghostscript from Darwin Ports or Fink.
Xfig
Xfig is a drawing program that accepts yorick eps files. This is how I generate presentations based on yorick graphics, or prepare figures for publications.
Get Xfig from Darwin Ports or Fink.
LaTeX, ConText, etc.
TeX is the definitive scientific publication software. It accepts yorick or xfig generated eps and pdf files for graphics, adds unbeatable mathematical typesetting.
You should also install the AUCTeX package in order to make it easier to compose LaTeX/ConText source in GNU EMacs.
The MacTeX distribution is probably the best choice for installing the entire TeX system on your Mac. (You can also install the no-longer-supported teTeX distribution from Fink, and there are several other options.) AUCTeX for GNU Emacs is available from either Darwin Ports or Fink
Working with folders
Yorick assumes that you understand how to navigate your computer's filesystem. Unlike graphical user interfaces, you must understand how to do this using the textual names of the directories and files. There will be no icons to click on; you need to know where your files are and be able to type their names. Yorick has a cd (change directory) command to change its current working directory, so that when you have many files to read or write, you can omit their directory names. If you are using Emacs, use M-x cd RET in the yorick command buffer in order to change directories; this permits you to navigate the file tree easily with TAB name completion.
You should (almost) never use the directory containing this file or any of its subdirectories to store your working files or projects. Keep those in your personal directory tree.