These are common steps to build Notes from source on macOS.
macOS Catalina 10.15 (or newer) is required to build Notes.
This guide assumes you already have Xcode Command Line Tools (version 11 or newer) and Homebrew both installed.
Required Homebrew packages:
git
qt@6
(qt@5
is also supported, but not recommended)cmake
ninja
Please refer to build_options.md.
First, use git
to clone the project and its components, and then navigate into it:
git clone https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes.git --recurse-submodules
cd notes
Optionally, if you want to dedicate all cores of your CPU to build Notes much faster, set this environment variable:
export CMAKE_BUILD_PARALLEL_LEVEL=$(sysctl -n hw.logicalcpu)
After that, we're ready to build Notes!
Invoke CMake to build the project into a folder called build
, in Release
mode:
cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release'
Alternatively, if you want to target both x86_64
and arm64
(Apple Silicon) architectures in a single, universal binary, invoke CMake like this instead (please note that this might be unsupported on Qt versions older than 6):
cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES='x86_64;arm64'
After Notes is built, you can use the macdeployqt
tool from Qt to include the required libraries to your app bundle:
macdeployqt 'build/Notes.app' -appstore-compliant
You can now install Notes by either dragging the Notes.app
folder (found in build/bin
), into the Applications
folder.
Alternatively, you can run Notes directly by executing build/bin/Notes.app/Contents/MacOS/Notes
.