Installed Octave 4.2.1 with brew on MacOS; can't get it to run with a GUI

Question

I installed Octave on my macOS Sierra using Homebrew with the command

brew install octave

and everything installed fine.

When I run Octave, however, it prints version 4.2.1, but I do not get the GUI nor can I force the GUI with octave --force-gui. No error message or warning is generated, the app just starts in the command line.

How do I get Octave to run with a GUI?

Connotation

try reinstalling Octave with brew reinstall octave --with-qt --with-fltk --with-gui – Wat

I tried that but got warnings like this: octave: this formula has no --with-gui option so it will be ignored! – Connotation

btw what version of Mac OSX Sierra do you have ? – Wat

Mac Sierra 10.12.6 – Connotation

You may find this helpful – Wat

@SardarUsama Where did you get these options? None of those exist on the octave formula. – Irruption

@Irruption apple.stackexchange.com/questions/121525/… – Wat

@SardarUsama Thanks. I guess they existed at some point then got removed. – Irruption

I decided to uninstall octave using brew and reinstalled it using MacPort. All works fine now. Thanks for your help. – Connotation

See here github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/15986 – Orientalize

Answer 1

Run brew uninstall octave to removed the octave executables. Use MacPort instead of homebrew. Run 'port selfupgrade' and then 'port install octave'. It installs octave in the opt/local/bin directory. Type octave and it runs with the GUI. Version 4.2.1 was installed and seems to work fine.

Connotation

I also ran into the same brew issue and macports also worked for me for v4.2.2. I'm on High Sierra. – Formal

I was following these steps but when trying to 'port install octave' I get an error message: "Error: Unable to open port: no such compiler: clang36" – Micro

I am not aware of any problems or what the error message means. I assume you updated MacPorts. Do you have gcc installed. – Connotation

it should be port selfupdate as shown in comment by dvallejo above. – Connotation

Answer 2

Try running the command octave --gui instead of octave --force-gui.

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