MNELAB menus don't work on macOS about mnelab-feedstock

[hoechenberger]

Can you point me to similar Qt issues that do not involve conda? I could try and see if these things work on my setup.

Yes, will do that later tonight :)

[hoechenberger]

Thanks for the report, I will look into this

[hoechenberger]

@cbrnr If if Cmd-Tab to another app and then Cmd-Tab back to MNELAB again, the menus work. Very odd…

[hoechenberger]

So this seems to be a quite common problem.

Just leaving this here for reference:
napari/napari#380 (comment)

[cbrnr]

The strange thing is that it does work on the same machine without conda (i.e. Homebrew Python, mostly identical package versions). I've had issues with conda and Qt in the past, so this might be yet another problem. Another issue is that the entry at the top left isn't MNELAB, but python3.8 - pip installing pyobjc-framework-cocoa doesn't help either (it seems like there aren't any conda-forge packages). I'm thinking if it is a good idea to have conda-forge instructions in the MNELAB installation instructions when we know it doesn't work on macOS...

[hoechenberger]

@cbrnr I'll leave this up to you, of course :) I will keep investigating the issue and can offer to keep you posted!

[hoechenberger]

@cbrnr State of my current research results is:
This seems to be an issue that many people report, even when just using Qt (i.e., it's not specific to PyQt) on macOS. Only way to reliably work around this is to create a .app bundle. I'm surprised it's working for you with homebrew, though!

[cbrnr]

I never had problems with Qt on my Mac, including PyQt/PySide2. However, every time I try to use conda (especially in combination with Qt, but not exclusively) something doesn't work - that's why I stick with Homebrew Python, it just works much better in my experience. I can't find the issues I had off the top of my head, I'm not even sure I reported all of them (because I immediately switched back to Homebrew Python). Some of them had to do with Python not being a framework build in Anaconda, which Qt didn't like. Not sure if this is related or if it has been resolved so far.

Can you point me to similar Qt issues that do not involve conda? I could try and see if these things work on my setup.

[hoechenberger]

@cbrnr If I run mnelab through pythonw (which is installed as part of the python.app package), all works well. Currently trying to fix the mnelab entry point on macOS in #11 and #12

As for starting MNELAB via python -m mnelab, we could simply add a small workaround to MNELAB itself if that would be okay with you; I've done this before for PsychoPy. Idea is to figure out if the current Python interpreter is the type installed from Anaconda/Miniconda/conda-forge and running on macOS, and if yes, spawn a new process via pythonw. I could file a PR upstream. Let me know what you think!

[hoechenberger]

The entry point was fixed via #11, #12, and #13.

Invocation via python -m mnelab will start working once cbrnr/mnelab#119 gets merged upstream.

[cbrnr]

cbrnr/mnelab#119 was merged so closing this.