Installing Coot on Mac

There are two types of ways to install Coot on MacOS. One is to simply install the CCP4 package, which have coot bundled inside it. The other method is installing it through homebrew. I will start with the one I found the most useful.

Installing Through CCP4 package

The Collaborative Computational Project Number 4 was a very old project indeed. But it contains a lot of useful toos for macromolecule crystollography, including Coot. We just need to go to the website of CCP4 and click download.

However, remember to pay attention to the ATTENTION part in front of the Download Now! You need to have XQuartz installed before everything can work.

So if you can't get any of the CCP4 applications to work, don't worry and calm down, just install XQuartz and everything will be fine.

Installing Through Homebrew

If you are not feeling very comfortable and don't want to take the more easier path, you can also install it through Homebrew. Take a very good look at this github repo, and you will find that your path is very clear.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/YoshitakaMo/homebrew-bio/coot/Formula/coot.rb
brew install ./coot.rb --verbose --HEAD

These two commands are needed to install Coot. However, only these two commands are not enough. You need to ensure that you have the right edition of gtk+3 because Coot does not support the latter versions very well. Follow this issue and download an older version of gtk+3. But I need to warn you, although the new Coot looks cool, it doesn't work very well and have a lot of bugs.

Have Fun with Coot!