EasySpin comes in a single zip file, containing all toolbox functions and the full documentation.

Visit the EasySpin website for downloading the latest version.

EasySpin requires MATLAB 9.11 (R2021b) or later on either Windows, Linux or Mac. EasySpin is not guaranteed to run on MATLAB versions older than R2021b. Beyond a basic MATLAB installation, no additional MATLAB toolboxes are needed to run EasySpin. EasySpin does not run on Octave (a free MATLAB clone).

1. Download and unpack EasySpin
   Download the EasySpin zip file and unpack it to a folder of your choice, e.g., C:\ or /var/myfiles/. Once unpacked, EasySpin is contained in a subfolder of C:\ (or /var/myfiles/ or whatever folder you chose) which in turn contains several subfolders:
   • easyspin-x.y.z/easyspin - all the toolbox functions.
   • easyspin-x.y.z/documentation - documentation, entry point is index.html.
   • easyspin-x.y.z/examples - all examples, grouped into subfolders.
2. Tell MATLAB about EasySpin
   Launch MATLAB and go to Home → Set Path. Remove any folders containing older EasySpin installations from the MATLAB search path. Add the EasySpin subfolder easyspin-x.y.z/easyspin to the MATLAB search path by clicking on "Add Folder...", selecting the easyspin-x.y.z/easyspin subfolder from your new EasySpin directory, and clicking on "Save".
3. Check EasySpin
   In MATLAB, type easyspin at the command prompt. This will display information about the installed version of EasySpin. Also, it might try to compile a few files from the easyspin/private folder. Possibly you are asked to select or install a C compiler. See below for information on how to proceed in that case.
4. Documentation
   There are several ways to access the documentation. To view the documentation of your local EasySpin installation, type easyspin doc in the command window, or point your web browser to documentation/index.html in your EasySpin folder and bookmark that page. Alternatively, you can go to easyspin.org to view the online documentation of the most recent stable version of EasySpin (which might be different from the one you installed locally).

A few small but performance-critical parts of EasySpin are not written in MATLAB, but in C. These parts come pre-compiled with the EasySpin distribution, and most often you don't have to do anything.

However, in some cases it might be necessary to recompile them for your platform using a C compiler. For this, run the following in the MATLAB command window:

easyspin compile

This calls mex to compile the *.c files in the easyspin/private folder and generate the associated binary files *.mexa64 (Linux), *.mexw64 (Windows) or *.mexmaci (Mac).

If this process throws an error, it indicates that there is a problem with the installed compiler, or that no compiler is installed. You might have to download and install a C compiler for your platform. To display information about the default C compiler used by MATLAB for compiling mex files, run the following in the MATLAB command window:

mex -setup C

If no compiler is configured, or the configured one is not installed, do the following:

• Windows: Download and install the C compiler MinGW - see list of compatible compilers for supported versions.
• Mac: The C compiler Clang is already pre-installed on recent versions of macOS. If not, download and install Xcode.
• Linux: The C compiler gcc is already pre-installed on most Linux distributions.

You can use the mex command with mex -setup to change the default compiler.

After installing the compiler, run the following again:

easyspin compile

There are known issues for running newer Matlab GUIs on Linux systems that do not use the X windowing system, which also affects EasySpin's GUIs (e.g. the esfit GUI). Setting the display server for the Linux session to Xorg typically solves the problem.

EasySpin is free and open source software and is published under the permissive MIT license.