TeXstudio on macOS ARM CPUs 11 August 2022
TeXstudio, which is my beloved LaTeX editor, offers yet no binaries for the new ARM architecture on Apple Macs with CPUs named M1, M2, et cetera. Neither does Homebrew offer a precompiled bottle for that architecture. Existing packages for the Intel CPU architectures lead to emulation overhead with the Rosetta emulator, however. A higher performance is provided with suitable ARM binaries.
This short post describes a process to build the TeXstudio application on macOS with the ARM architecture. It is assumed that Homebrew is installed already.
Install a custom poppler build
First, we need to add a dependency (namely the PDF rendering library poppler) such that it can be used for building TeXstudio. In particular, we need to enable Qt. This is achieved by editing poppler’s Homebrew package:
brew edit poppler
Herein, add
depends_on "qt"
and change
-DENABLE_QT6=OFF
to
-DENABLE_QT6=ON
Then, compile and install poppler from source with
brew install -s poppler
or, in case poppler has been installed before, do
brew reinstall -s poppler
Build TeXstudio
Then, get the TeXstudio sources and compile them:
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/texstudio-org/texstudio.git
cd texstudio
qmake texstudio.pro
make -j8
make installAfter that, texstudio.app is installed in /Applications.