Krita's support on OSX

Krita is officially supported on the three major operating systems (Windows, Linux and MacOS). I haven't tried neither the Linux version nor the Windows one, so that I can't comment on how good it works on them. On OSX, however, I'm pretty satisfied with what I get compared with other open source solutions I tried.

I recently bought a graphic tablet (Wacom Intuos). This is the first time I experiment with such a tool. I first tried using it in Gimp (which is a very nice software by the way), but it turned to be quite complex to setup and, even after that, the result was very disappointing. When I discovered Krita and tried it, I became familiar with the basic operations very quickly, and I could produce nice art (I'm just a beginner artist, so what I really mean is that I could get results similar to those I get on paper with a pencil, which is the best I can hope for).

One caveat, though, is that Krita crashes from time to time. Since I prefer by far relying on open source softwares in general, even if they are not as stable as one would like, I decided I would try to fix these bugs instead of using a propritary software such as Photoshop. Even if Krita, on its homepage, mentions that it should not be considered as a replacement of Photoshop, in my case, it seems to be a good one!

From there, I started trying to build Krita from source. I discovered that it was not easy: The building process on OSX is not very mature (it's more complex than just typing ./configure, make, sudo make install) and I had to fix many little things to make everything work. Fortunately, I went on the #krita channel on freenode.net and there were friendly people there that made the process less painful.

My setup

Just before I show what I did, I would like to describe my setup since it is probably different from yours:

• I use a MacBook Pro with Yosemite 10.10.5;

• I use Macports, so that I don't have Homebrew (it's not a good idea to use them together);

• I had already installed the dependencies mentioned for the build:

  • Git;
  • Clang;
  • CMake.

  The first two dependencies come with XCode, and the last one was installed with MacPorts.

• I would like to add that I have many other softwares installed so that you might encounter another dependency that I am not aware of.

Cloning the repo

This step is easy. I located the clone in the ~/Applications/krita folder (which was created manually). Then, I typed

git clone https://anongit.kde.org/krita

(Notice that there is a krita folder inside the "root" krita folder, which can be confusing but at least, each folder remains clean during the build.) You might as well already create four additional folders that will be used later:

mkdir b d i build

Therefore, the content of ~/Applications/krita should be

$ ls
b     build d     i     krita

Each folder is used for a different purpose:

• b for building the dependencies;
• d for downloading files used in building the dependencies;
• i for the installation of the dependencies;
• build for Krita's build.

From now, most of the steps I followed can be found in the file krita/3rdparty/README.md.

Building Krita's dependencies

Before starting this part, it is convenient to define two environment variables that will be used through the whole installation. Assuming that you are still in ~/Applications/krita, I just typed

export BUILD_ROOT=`pwd`

Then I entered the b directory:

cd b

And I ran CMake:

export PATH=$BUILD_ROOT/i/bin
cmake ../krita/3rdparty/ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$BUILD_ROOT/i \
    -DEXTERNALS_DOWNLOAD_DIR=$BUILD_ROOT/d -DINSTALL_ROOT=$BUILD_ROOT/i

Next, you might try building all dependencies at once. Note that the first one (ext_qt) might be very long to download and build):

cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_qt
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_zlib
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_boost
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_eigen3
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_exiv2
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_fftw3
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_ilmbase
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_jpeg
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_lcms2
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_ocio
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_openexr
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_png
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_tiff
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_gsl
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_vc
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_libraw
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target ext_kwindowsystem

Also, in my case, contrary to what is mentioned in the README.md file, building openexr did not fail. Finally, the last step took me some time to figure out since some URLs were not updated (this should be fix now).

Building Krita

Now, enter the build directory. Then type:

cmake ../krita -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$BUILD_ROOT/i -DDEFINE_NO_DEPRECATED=1 \
    -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF -DKDE4_BUILD_TESTS=OFF -DPACKAGERS_BUILD=ON \
    -DBUNDLE_INSTALL_DIR=$BUILD_ROOT/i/bin -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo

And finally (do not put sudo in front of make install):

make
make install

Running Krita

If everything went all right, you should find the executable in

$BUILD_ROOT/i/bin/krita.app/Contents/MacOS/krita