Building from source

• Configuring Mitos’s runtime files
  • Linux and macOS
  • Windows
  • Multiple runtime directories
  • Note to packagers
• Validating the installation
• Configure the desktop shortcut
• Building the Debian package

Requirements:

Clone the Mitos GitHub repository into a directory of your choice. The examples in this documentation assume installation into either ~/src/ on Linux and macOS, or %userprofile%\src\ on Windows.

• The Rust toolchain
• The Git version control system
• A C++14 compatible compiler to build the tree-sitter grammars, for example GCC or Clang

If you are using the musl-libc standard library instead of glibc the following environment variable must be set during the build to ensure tree-sitter grammars can be loaded correctly:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-feature=-crt-static"

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/mitos-editor/mitos
   cd mitos
   

2. Compile from source:

   # Optimized release build
   cargo build --release --locked
   

   # Optimized for the current CPU
   cargo install \
      --profile opt \
      --config 'build.rustflags=["-C", "target-cpu=native"]' \
      --path crates/term \
      --locked
   

   The release build creates target/release/ms; the install command places ms in Cargo’s binary directory. Both commands construct the tree-sitter grammars in the local runtime folder. ms is short for Mitos.

💡 If you do not want to fetch or build grammars, set an environment variable MITOS_DISABLE_AUTO_GRAMMAR_BUILD

💡 Tree-sitter grammars can be fetched and compiled if not pre-packaged. Fetch grammars with ms --grammar fetch and compile them with ms --grammar build. This will install them in the runtime directory within the user’s mitos config directory (more details below).

💡 If you only want to build some grammars, see use-grammars

Configuring Mitos’s runtime files

Linux and macOS

The runtime directory is one below the Mitos source, so either export a MITOS_RUNTIME environment variable to point to that directory and add it to your ~/.bashrc or equivalent:

export MITOS_RUNTIME=~/src/mitos/runtime

Or, create a symbolic link:

ln -Tsf $PWD/runtime ~/.config/mitos/runtime

Windows

Either set the MITOS_RUNTIME environment variable to point to the runtime files using the Windows setting (search for Edit environment variables for your account) or use the setx command in Cmd:

setx MITOS_RUNTIME "%userprofile%\src\mitos\runtime"

💡 %userprofile% resolves to your user directory like C:\Users\Your-Name\ for example.

Or, create a symlink in %appdata%\mitos\ that links to the source code directory:

💡 On Windows, creating a symbolic link may require running PowerShell or Cmd as an administrator.

Multiple runtime directories

When Mitos finds multiple runtime directories it will search through them for files in the following order:

1. The workspace’s runtime/ directory relative to $CARGO_MANIFEST_DIR (this is intended for developing and testing mitos only).
2. runtime/ subdirectory of OS-dependent mitos user config directory.
3. $MITOS_RUNTIME
4. Distribution-specific fallback directory (set at compile time—not run time— with the MITOS_DEFAULT_RUNTIME environment variable)
5. runtime/ subdirectory of path to Mitos executable.

This order also sets the priority for selecting which file will be used if multiple runtime directories have files with the same name.

Note to packagers

If you are making a package of Mitos for end users, to provide a good out of the box experience, you should set the MITOS_DEFAULT_RUNTIME environment variable at build time (before invoking cargo build) to a directory which will store the final runtime files after installation. For example, say you want to package the runtime into /usr/lib/mitos/runtime. The rough steps a build script could follow are:

1. export MITOS_DEFAULT_RUNTIME=/usr/lib/mitos/runtime
2. cargo build --profile opt --locked
3. cp -r runtime $BUILD_DIR/usr/lib/mitos/
4. cp target/opt/ms $BUILD_DIR/usr/bin/ms

This way the resulting ms binary will always look for its runtime directory in /usr/lib/mitos/runtime if the user has no custom runtime in ~/.config/mitos or MITOS_RUNTIME.

Validating the installation

To make sure everything is set up as expected you should run the Mitos health check:

ms --health

The command reports runtime, clipboard, language-server, and grammar status.

Configure the desktop shortcut

If your desktop environment supports the XDG desktop menu you can configure Mitos to show up in the application menu by copying the provided .desktop file:

cp contrib/Mitos.desktop ~/.local/share/applications

It is recommended to convert the links in the .desktop file to absolute paths to avoid potential problems:

sed -i -e "s|Exec=ms %F|Exec=$(readlink -f ~/.cargo/bin/ms) %F|g" \
  ~/.local/share/applications/Mitos.desktop

To use another terminal than the system default, you can modify the .desktop file. For example, to use kitty:

sed -i "s|Exec=ms %F|Exec=kitty ms %F|g" ~/.local/share/applications/Mitos.desktop
sed -i "s|Terminal=true|Terminal=false|g" ~/.local/share/applications/Mitos.desktop

Building the Debian package

If the .deb file provided on the release page uses a libc version higher than that used by your Debian, Ubuntu, or Mint system, you can build the package from source to match your system’s dependencies.

Install cargo-deb, the tool used for building the .deb file:

cargo install cargo-deb

After cloning and entering the Mitos repository as previously described, use the following command to build the release binary and package it into a .deb file in a single step.

cargo deb -- --locked

💡 This locks you into the --release profile. But you can also build mitos in any way you like. As long as you leave a target/release/ms file, it will get packaged with cargo deb --no-build

💡 Don’t worry about the following:

warning: Failed to find dependency specification

Cargo deb just reports which packaged files it didn’t derive dependencies for. But so far the dependency deriving seams very good, even if some of the grammar files are skipped.

You can find the resulted .deb in target/debian/. It should contain everything it needs, including the

• completions for bash, fish, zsh
• .desktop file
• launcher to the binary with the runtime