How to easily run Windows applications on Mac? Wineskin app

No matter how much we love our Macs and OS X, we still can't completely abandon Windows, and sometimes there are situations when you need to use one or another application. As an example, one can cite bank clients, various accounting and corporate specialized tools, as well as games (where can we go without them). There are several ways to run Windows applications on a Mac - using BootCamp or a virtual machine like Paralles or Virtualbox. But if you only need to work with applications, and not just with the operating system, but there is a better way - this is Wineskin, a port of Wine known to Linux developers. About it and how to use it to run "Windows" applications in OS X, I will describe and show in detail in this article.

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Wineskin is a Mac adaptation of Wine, an emulator (although it's not entirely correct to call it that, because the acronym Wine stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”) or the so-called compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows applications on some POSIX-compatible operating systems. including Linux and Mac. Do not be alarmed, this is not as difficult as it seems and is not at all scary.

Installing Wineskin

1. First of all, we need to download Wineskin from the official site. At the moment, the latest version is 2.5.12.

2. Move the downloaded Wineskin.app to the Programs folder and launch it.

3. At the first start, you will need to download the fresh "WS9Wine" engine, which is a component necessary for the operation of Windows applications. Click "+" and select "Download and Install".

4. Next, install the "Wrapper" by clicking on the "Update" button. After that, you will notice that the "Create New Blank Wrapper" button will become active.

Installing a Windows application

Before you start, make sure you have the.exe file of the desired application and that it is supported by Wineskin. At the moment, Wineskin does not work with all applications and you can check the compatibility of the applications you are interested in in the official Wine's AppDB.

1. To create a new wrapper, press “Create New Blank Wrapper” and assign a name to it. For example, let's install the popular Notepad ++ on Mac.

2. Wineskin prompts you to download the "Mono" package, which you need to run. NET applications. We agree and install.

3. In the same way, install the "Gecko" component required to run HTML applications.

4. After the wrapper is created, open it in Finder, right-click and select “Show package contents”.

5. Here we have two folders (“Contents” and “drive_c”) and Wineskin.app.

6. Launch Wineskin.app and click “Install Software”.

7. Next, click “Choose Setup executable” and select the installation file of our Windows application.

8. The installation process is completely similar to that in Windows. Install our application following the prompts of the installation wizard.

Launching a Windows application

1. Now it remains for us to test the installed application. To do this, run our wrapper again, but this time select the “Advanced” item.

2. Specify the path to the folder with our installed application, click "Test Run".

3. The application will launch and you should see something like this.

4. Everything. Now you can launch our app directly from Launchpad or the Applications folder. For example, for me it looks like this.

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If you need a full-fledged Windows environment, then the ideal option is still to use Bootcamp or a virtual machine. But if you just want to be able to run applications, then you can get by with a little blood and use Wineskin. As you can see, it's not that difficult.

Do you have any questions, comments or suggestions? Welcome to the comments - I am always happy to chat and help you, dear readers. Stay tuned, there is still a lot of interesting things to come!