Ask HN: Porting an X11 App to Mac

1 points by dhruvarora 13 years ago | 2 comments

A friend of mine uses a gesture-based app on Linux and I'd like to port it to OS X. The code is open-sourced and available on Github but I have no idea where to start.

Got some tips, articles that could point me in the right direction?

psgbg 13 years ago |

You could start with macports or homebrew. Those tools allows you to install open source software in OS X.

One example is XQuartz the X11 port for OS X http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/Releases

If you know what are you doing probably this is a good point to start, and if you need other libraries then you should look there too.

informatimago 13 years ago |

First, Apple still has a X11 server on MacOSX, so you can just compile and run your X application there.

Otherwise, learn Objective-C and Cocoa, and rewrite the user interface. Works better when the application is well modularised to begin with.