Installed Octave 4.2.1 with brew on MacOS; can't get it to run with a GUI

Question

I installed Octave on my macOS Sierra using Homebrew with the command

brew install octave

and everything installed fine.

When I run Octave, however, it prints version 4.2.1, but I do not get the GUI nor can I force the GUI with octave --force-gui. No error message or warning is generated, the app just starts in the command line.

How do I get Octave to run with a GUI?

Answer 1

Run brew uninstall octave to removed the octave executables. Use MacPort instead of homebrew. Run 'port selfupgrade' and then 'port install octave'. It installs octave in the opt/local/bin directory. Type octave and it runs with the GUI. Version 4.2.1 was installed and seems to work fine.

Answer 2

Try running the command octave --gui instead of octave --force-gui.