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Installation

Installation

contour is packaged and available for installation on multiple distributions.

Windows 10 or newer

Please download Contour for Windows (the .msi file) from our release page, and double click on it to install.

macOS

brew install contour

Fedora Linux

Use the official package

sudo dnf install contour-terminal

Arch Linux

Please use the AUR, at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/contour-git.

Ubuntu Linux

Please download Contour for Ubuntu Linux (the .deb files) from our official release page, and then use the following command to install:

sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/contour-0.3.12.262-UBUNTU_VERSION-ARCH.deb

If you want to provide feedback in case of any crashes, also install the debug symbols (.ddeb-file), e.g.:

sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/contour-0.3.12.262-UBUNTU_VERSION-ARCH.ddeb

Flatpak

Contour is available at the Flathub store.

Get it on Flathub

Installing from source

Contour is best installed from supported package managers, but you can build from source by following the instruction below. You can Qt 5 or Qt 6, by default contour will be compiler with Qt 6, to change Qt version use QTVER=5 ./scripts/install-deps.sh to fetch dependencies and cmake flag -D CONTOUR_QT_VERSION=5.

UNIX-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, macOS)

Prerequisites

./scripts/install-deps.sh

This script might ask you for the administrator password if a package dependency can be insalled via the system package manager.

Compile

You can use cmake presets to compile contour. The full list of available presets can be seen using cmake --list-presets. To compile release build for linux or MacOs use linux-release or macos-release accordingly. FreeBSD users can use linux-release or configure cmake manually.

cmake --preset linux-release 
cmake --build --preset linux-release

# Optionally, if you want to install from source
cmake --build --preset linux-release --target install

Please mind, if you want to install into a system root, e.g. /usr/local, you may need to prefix the install command with sudo.

Also, ensure that the terminfo file is correctly resolved, as the terminfo library is very limited in locating the correct terminfo files (e.g. it does not search in /usr/local), you can symlink into ~/.terminfo however.

Windows 10 or newer

Prerequisites

For Windows, you must have Windows 10, 2018 Fall Creators Update, and Visual Studio 2019, installed. It will neither build nor run on any prior Windows OS, due to libterminal making use of ConPTY API.

  1. Set up vcpkg, preferably somewhere high up in the folder hierarchy, and add the folder to your PATH.
cd C:\
git clone git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
.\vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
  1. Install Visual Studio Build Tools (make sure to select the CLI tools for C++, which you might need to do in the separate components tab).
  2. Install Qt6 (i.e. to C:\Qt)
  3. Open the developer version of Powershell.
  4. In the contour source folder execute .\scripts\install-deps.ps1. This step may take a very long time.

Compile

In the developer version of Powershell:

# change paths accordingly if you installed QT and vcpkg to somewhere else
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=C:\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=C:\Qt\6.5.0\msvc2019_64\lib\cmake
cmake --build build/

# Optionally, if you want to install from source
cmake --build build/ --target install