Known Issues macOS
There are a few known issues with IDL widgets and macOS/OSX, running the latest XQuartz (2.7.11), including:
Segmentation fault while running code that involves widgets (SPEDAS GUI, EVA, etc.)
Warning: Fatal Error:
_XmGetDefaultDisplay cannot be used prior to VendorS.Initialize, returns NULL
Segmentation fault: 11
See solution to the problem below.
IDL may close abruptly and without warning when running code that involves widgets
Solution:
Both of these issues can be fixed at the command line with the following:
1. change to the X11 library directory:
cd /opt/X11/lib
2. backup the libXt library file found in this directory:
sudo cp libXt.6.dylib libXt.6.dylib.bak
3. change to the “flat_namespace” directory:
cd flat_namespace/
4. copy the copy of libXt from this directory up one directory:
sudo cp libXt.6.dylib ../.
On macOS Sierra you may get the following error:
Error: attempt to add non-widget child "dsm" to parent "idl" which supports only widgets
To fix this, you have to run the following two commands:
sudo mv /opt/X11/lib/libXt.6.dylib{,.bak}
sudo cp /opt/X11/lib{/flat_namespace,}/libXt.6.dylib
See also: http://michaelgalloy.com/2016/11/11/problems-with-xquartz-2-7-11-on-macos.html
No annotations/legend text showing in GUI
This issue is due to corrupt IDL configuration files; to fix, delete the .idl folder in your IDL working directory
IDL freezes after compiling loadct2 with IDL 8.5.1 on macOS 10.14 + Anaconda
A conflict was found between IDL and Anaconda (http://anaconda.com) on the latest macOS. If a load routine call seems to freeze after compiling loadct2 and you're running both Anaconda and macOS 10.14, a simple fix is to remove and reinstall Anaconda.