Getting Started with @dyalogapl APL on OS X for the Truly Impatient

• These are the steps that I took to get Dyalog up and running on an OS X 10.11 box for my first time ever
• Dyalog is easy to set up on OS X
• These notes are the shortest specific steps that I found to get Dyalog up and running
• My goal is to evaluate ⍳5 using my laptop keyboard
• My notes follow

• There are four different licenses that make Dyalog accessible to every kind of user

0 Unregistered Nagware
0 Educational Share project details
100 Personal/Non-Commercial NA
2000 Commercial NA
• Go to $HOME/.dyalog and initialize a Git repo and add everything and commit it • Install the fixed-width APL385 font into $HOME/Library/Fonts/
• Install keyboard mapping for APL glyphs into \$HOME/Library/Keyboard Layouts following the setup directions
• The default way to switch input sources is
• control-<space> previous input source
• control-option-space next input source
• Emacs will notice, so change it to
• option-space previous
• option-shift-space next
• Print out the Default Keyboard page to keep on your desk
• You can also find the layout here which is nice if you want to change the font size or color of the printout. The APL symbols are difficult to read when they are in orange on white.
• I pasted it into a text editor and made it black on white, and increased the font (APL385) size to 41 to fill the entire page
• After playing around with I learned that when you print the PDF you can adjust the zoom to fill the entire page, so I did so
• Here is the final result
• Start Dyalog
• Make sure that it works
• Should be able to evaluate ⍳5 now
• Hold Option and push the I key and then 5 and hit return
• Most APL examples on the Internet are IBM APL2
• This is how I got started