Install and run CoCoA

Macintosh

MacOS X

You may use the Textual Interface (within Terminal) or Emacs Interface (within Emacs) or the GraphicalUserInterface:

Textual interface

Download CoCoA and DRAG the CoCoA-4.7 folder into the Applications folder.

Double-click on the cocoa icon. This should automatically open the application Terminal and run CoCoA into it.

If you want to add cocoa to your Dock just drag the icon into the file area of your Dock (next to the Trash icon)

This way you will have NO EDITING facilities, so you might want to:

• open the CoCoA files with your preferred editor
• CUT and PASTE CoCoA commands from it to the CoCoA-Terminal window.

More instructions

Graphical interface

Emacs interface

Download CoCoA and DRAG the CoCoA-4.7 folder into the Applications folder.

May 2006 : Suggested Emacs application (a proper Emacs with a remarkable Macintosh «feel») Carbon Emacs Package (for Mac OS X 10.4 or later)
C-x/C-c/C-v cut and paste (CUA) and Save Options from its Options menu [NB: C stands for the control key and not the command (apple) key] —>

Setting up Emacs

For Emacs experts: copy the settings you want from CoCoA-4.7/emacs/cocoa.emacs into your

/.emacs.

For everyone else: go to the folder emacs in CoCoA-4.7 and double-click on one of new-prefs.command creates a brand new .emacs file (moving the old one, if you had one, into previous.emacs)
update-prefs.command adds one line to your current .emacs file (creating it if necessary)

ALL SET!!
Now Emacs recognises files with a CoCoA extension ( .coc, .cocoa, .cpkg): REMEMBER to add one to the name of your files!

If under Finder you cannot see the file extensions I suggest you check [Advanced] Show all file extensions in Finder — Preferences. .

Open by dragging: You may open any file in Emacs by dragging it onto the Emacs icon or into an Emacs window.

Open by double-click: If you want all your cocoa files to open with Emacs when double-clicked, this is what you need to do:

1. Select in Finder a file with a cocoa extension, say foo.cocoa and select File — Get Info, click the Open with: triangle and choose Other. to select Emacs.
2. Now click on Change all. to «Use this application to open all documents like this» (i.e. with the extension .cocoa ).

A few words for the Emacs beginners.

Older Emacs applications for MacOSX 10.2 and MacOSX 10.1: download and move into the Applications folder.

MacOS 9

The code will (should) automatically expand into a folder called «CoCoA 4.0».

When you are in the folder «CoCoA 4.0», double-click on «CoCoA 4» to run the program.

The manual is called by typing Man( ); . If you want to know about some topic, e.g. Hilbert-Poincare’ Series, type a suitable substring, e.g. Man(«hilb»);

To quit CoCoA select «Quit» from the «Edit» menu.

Unix/Linux

Download CoCoA and gunzip-tar your binary in the directory you want, e.g. It will produce a directory called «cocoa-4.7».

For a personal installation

When you are in the directory «cocoa-4.7/», type ./cocoa_text to run the program.

For a system wide installation

To allow all users in a Unix system to share the same installation you should:

if your cocoa directory is NOT /usr/local/cocoa-4.7 then you need to edit the file called cocoa according to the instructions contained therein (you probably want to change only the value of the variable COCOA_PREFIX=/usr/local/cocoa-4.7 ).

link it to some publicly accessible directory of executables like this:
Any user may then type cocoa xcocoa —>to run the program from any directory. /usr/lib/qt-2.3.0 (the default installation location for that version of the QT library) then there should be no need to change XCoCoA either. —> cocoa-4.1 :
e.g. COCOA_LIBRARY=/usr/local/cocoa-4.1/
The file «CoCoA» will then be the program which you should call INSTEAD OF «cocoa». You may put the file «CoCoA» wherever is convenient for you:
e.g. (if installed by root) save «CoCoA» as /usr/local/bin/cocoa and —>

Graphical interface

Textual interface

Emacs Interface

Open your .emacs file with any editor (it should be in your home, and it may not exist!):

• If you are familiar about changing your .emacs, then copy the settings you want from cocoa-4.7/emacs/cocoa.emacs .

If you are not then just add this line at the end of your .emacs:
(load-file «

/emacs/cocoa.emacs»)
for example:
(load-file «/usr/local/cocoa-4.7/emacs/cocoa.emacs»)
If you did not install cocoa in /usr/local/ then you need to correct the path in the files:

/cocoa-4.7/cocoa

ALL SET!!
Now Emacs recognises files with a CoCoA extension ( .coc, .cocoa, .cpkg): REMEMBER to add one to the name of your files!

A few words for the Emacs beginners.

MS Windows

Just unzip it and you are ready to use it.
You may also want to create shortcuts to the files wincocoa.exe and CoCoAServer.exe on your desktop. Please remember to start the CoCoA server before starting WinCoCoA if you want to use CoCoA 5 functions such as GBasis5(. ).

The usage of the graphical user interface is explained below.

Unzip it and follow the easy instructions in the README-emacs file in the directory emacs-win

Here is a download for Emacs: choose emacs-NN.N-bin-i386.zip (with NN.N = 23.2 or higer)
http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/gnu/emacs/windows/

&nbsp For further installation instructions, we suggest you have a look at the CoCoA Forum and the CoCoA Wiki

Textual interface

The manual is called by typing Man( ); .
If you want to know about some topic, e.g. Hilbert-Poincare’ Series, type a suitable substring, e.g. Man(«hilb»); or ?hilb (starting from version 4.2)

To quit CoCoA type Quit; (or Ciao; 😉

Graphical User Interface (MacOS, Linux/Unix, MSWindows)

To enter commands from the interactive buffer click on the «cog» symbol in the top bar or type .

To enter commands from an editing buffer (file): a one-line command from a file or a selected region, type .

To quit enter Quit; or select Quit from the Edit menu.

Manual: Click on Help . You get a Windows help system which is self-explanatory. You can search for all commands containing (in their name or description) a given string.

Using CocoaPods on Windows

Apr 24, 2019 · 3 min read

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. With over 60 thousand libraries, it is the most popular repository of its kind, impacting over 3 million apps (quoting the official site).

Traditionally, the CocoaPods only targeted macOS, which made sense as it was meant to work with Xcode and the related toolchain. However, the success of cross-platform development frameworks such as Flutter or React Native gave rise to demand for CocoaPods to work on non-macOS platforms such as Windows (for example, some folks have reported issues #8055 and #8077).

Starting with CocoaPods 1.7 (in Beta as of time of writing), it is now possible to get some basic operations, such as pod install and pod update to run on Windows. This guide walks through the necessary steps to get this to work.

Step one — install Ruby

Ruby is required to run CocoaPods. An easy way to install Ruby is to download an installer from https://rubyinstaller.org/. Use the recommended download (Ruby+DevKit x64) unless you have a reason to install a different package.

When installing Ruby, accept the defaults but make sure “Use UTF-8 as default external encoding” is selected. Ruby will prompt to install MSYS — pick the first option ( MSYS2 base installation).

To confirm that Ruby has been properly installed, open a command prompt and type “ gem list”. If a list of gems is displayed, you’re all set.

Step two — install curl

CocoaPods uses curl to download packages. Since curl is not installed by default on Windows machines, you will need to install it — you can get curl from https://curl.haxx.se/dlwiz/?type=bin&os=Win64&flav=-&ver=*&cpu=x86_64. Download the latest 64-bit curl, extract the package and make sure that curl.exe in accessible via command line.

For example, if you’ve extracted curl as C:\curl-7.64.1_1-win64-mingw, add the following to your path: C:\curl-7.64.1_1-win64-mingw\bin (see “Environment Variables” in Advanced System Settings).

To confirm that curl has been installed, open a command prompt and type “ curl — help” — this should display the curl help pages.

Step three — install git

CocoaPods needs git and tar command-line tools. You can install git from https://git-scm.com/download/win. When installing git, you may select the “Use Git and optional Unix tools from the Command Prompt”. Use default settings for everything else.

To confirm that git and Unix tools have been installed, open a command prompt and type the “ git” and “ tar” commands.

Step four — install CocoaPods

Now that all the tools have been installed, install CocoaPods.

Run “ gem install cocoapods” to install the latest released version of CocoaPods. At the time of the writing, Windows support is only available in the Beta of CocoaPods 1.7.0, meaning you will need to run “ gem install cocoapods — pre” instead.

To confirm, open a command prompt and run the following command: “ pod — version”. You should see version 1.7.0 or higher.

Step five — running pod commands (optional)

In order to run “pod install”, you need an actual Xcode project. Since Xcode does not run on Windows, use a macOS machine with Xcode to generate an Xcode project. To test CocoaPods:

• Transfer the Xcode project to the Windows machine
• Navigate to the project folder using the command line
• Run “pod init” to create the Podfile
• Edit the Podfile and add some pods (for example, you can add “ Firebase/Analytics”)
• Run “pod install” to install the pods

How hard is it to get a Cocoa application to run on Windows?

There are also open source implementations of major parts of the Cocoa framework that allows cross-platform (including Microsoft Windows) Cocoa application development, such as GNUstep, Cappuccino, and Cocotron.

Yet when I looked into whether Mac application Tweetie was available for windows the developer had ruled it out:

Windows doesn’t have Cocoa, the programming environment that Tweetie is made in, as such, it seems like a poor possibility.

I’d like to have an answer to point the Tweetie developers (and as a resource for other cocoa developers) which would tell them:

• Which implementation is the most suitable for getting a cocoa app running on windows?
• How much work is it likely to take to get the app running under windows?
• How easy/hard is it to maintain a common code base for Mac and Windows?
• (any other considerations I’ve missed?)

Of course if it would be too much work I’d like to know that too before suggesting it and potentially sending someone else on a fruitless search.

3 Answers 3

1. “Major parts of the Cocoa frameworks” is not the same as “the entirety of the Cocoa frameworks”. Tweetie could be using something that’s missing.
2. Tweetie could be (very probably is) using APIs from the non-Cocoa frameworks, such as Core Foundation, Core Services, Core Graphics, and Core Animation. A port of the Cocoa frameworks alone won’t include any of these APIs, and even a more complete Mac-API-emulation framework will not include all of them.
3. These frameworks are eternally chasing Apple. Even if they catch up, they’ll be instantly behind again as of the next Mac OS X release. Mac developers already put off using new APIs in new Mac OS X releases while they wait for users to upgrade to those new releases; now you’re asking atebits to also wait for the other-framework developer to catch up to Apple again.
4. Any second implementation of an existing API will have bugs that the first implementation doesn’t, and vice versa. These differences will cause development and support problems.
5. You’re asking atebits to add a third platform to an application that already exists on two. Supporting one platform is a lot of work. Supporting two platforms is a hell of a lot of work. Supporting three? Now you’re getting into big-company territory.

So, even with these Cocoa-like frameworks, the answer is: Hard.

Cocoa Programming on Windows

Is there a way to develop windows applications using cocoa and objective-c in general

2 Answers 2

Well, Cocoa is specific to Mac OSX. But you might have a look at Cocotron.

For Objective-C, you might want to have a look at GNUStep.

To be clear, Objective-C is to Cocoa as C# is to .NET, or even as the Java language is to the Java platform — it’s the primary way of doing things. Objective-C can be used wherever the compiler supports it, but the Cocoa frameworks are really the most valuable part of the equation.

One should also note that (os OS X) Safari is a Cocoa app, but iTunes is not yet (it still uses the legacy Carbon APIs) so I’m not sure how it is on Windows. Apple has ported some significant parts of Cocoa to Windows DLL’s to port Safari, but to my knowledge, that code is not available for public consumption. (One can imagine that Apple doesn’t really want to make it easy to create robust apps for a competing OS, they have only published two key apps to further their own goals, like adoption of iPod/iTunes and the WebKit browser core.) Don’t expect to see these Cococa-Windows libraries become widely available; if they do, it will be a surprise to many of us.

As @Gregory mentioned, GNUStep and Cocotron are plausible options to explore, but I’d suggest thinking long and hard about whether you really should do what you’re asking. By and large, Microsoft’s tools have much better support for Windows, you’ll run into fewer undocumented limitations, and their native apps will tend to «feel right» to Windows users. I learned some time back that although I love Objective-C/Cocoa, if I ever had to write a Windows program, I would do it with the C#/.NET platform.