I'm on Mac 10.15.7 and I tried installing Gem from the package manager. It seems to have put everything in my externals folder no problem, but creating an object called gemwin doesn't do anything.

If I locate the help files however, it is able to load Gem but there seems to be some funky issues happening in the log. The main issue is I want to make sure the path is properly set up though.

@mrtunes Did you try adding "Gem" to File -> Settings -> Libraries?

yeah that works thank you 😀

fyi anyone else on my version this would be found in Preferences... Startup and then just type in Gem in the new box.

i came up with a new question - if i didn't want to load a library at startup, how would i load it manually?

@mrtunes Some libraries like Gem have a single binary. All of its objects are in the one binary and it has to be loaded and integrated with Pd as Pd starts.... because while running Pd looks for the objects by name as you "create" them.... not the libraries.
Others have separate binaries for each and every object and those you can switch on and off.
You need to move them from the extra folder (which is always searched by Pd) and put them in another of your choosing. Then use [declare -path c:/....../whatever] in a patch to turn them on.
But once they are found you cannot turn them off again until you restart Pd....... i.e. you cannot "undeclare".
David.

@mrtunes Or for Gem [declare -lib Gem] as long as it is in your path preferences.

FWIW I've come to agree with the [declare] approach. Currently my startup and search path preferences list one folder only. Externals are all in this folder. To use GEM, then I add the [declare -lib Gem] object -- and now the patch self-documents its dependencies.

hjh