Installing Pydee on OSX

Pydee is new and nifty graphical frontend for using Ipython. Unfortunately, there's no monolithic binary package available for installing (at least not on the Mac), and so users have to install and compile all the prerequisites. Given the the number of steps and small but important details, it's easy to get it wrong. Here's a step-by-step process for installing Pydee under OSX, which will also installs a full PyQt installation along the way. I assume that you are looking to install the Qt4 version of everything, as that is the one used by Pydee.

Download the latest binary installer for Qt from the Trolltech site. Open and run it. Qt is now installed.

Download and install SIP (a python wrapper for C code) from Riverbank. Either the stables or the overnight snapshots will work. Change directory into the package and run the configure.py file. Do the usual make / make install:

% cd sip python configure.py make sudo make install

Download and install QScintilla from Riverbank. (Note: QScintilla2, not 1.) Again either the stables or the overnight snapshots will work. Installation instructions are within the package. Change into the packages Qt4 directory and run qmake (the Qt make utility) on qscintilla.pro. Then do the usual make / make install:

% cd Qt4 qmake -spec macx-g++ qscintilla.pro make sudo make install

It's important that you pass -spec macx-g++ to qmake or it wil generate an Xcode project file instead of a makefile.

There are binding for QScintilla for PyQt. Don't run them yet.

Download and install PyQt from Riverbank, with the procedure as SIP:

% cd PyQt python configure.py make sudo make install

Now return to QScintilla, change into the Python directory and follow the same procedure:

% cd ../Python python configure.py make sudo make install

Now download and install Pydee with:

% easy_install pydee

and it can be called on the commandline with:

% pydee

That's it.