How to Get ImageMagick Display to Work on Mac OS X

Let's say you're playing with ImageMagick. And you've found all sorts of documentation that tells you what you can do with ImageMagick on Linux, but it doesn't seem to be working on your Mac. If you're on a Mac, you may not have some of the ImageMagick libraries by default. To fix this, you need to:

ImageMagick display command not working on Mac:

$ display pencil.png
display: delegate library support not built-in `' (X11) @ error/display.c/DisplayImageCommand/1904.

Resolution: Re-Install ImageMagick with X11

$ brew uninstall imagemagick
Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick/6.8.7-7...

$ brew install imagemagick --with-x11
==> Downloading https://downloads.sf.net/project/machomebrew/mirror/ImageMagick-6.8.7-7.tar.bz2 ######################################################################## 100.0%
==> ./configure --disable-osx-universal-binary --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick/6.8.7-7 --enable-shared --disable-static --without-pango --with-modules --disable-openmp --without-gslib --without-
==> make install
==> /usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick/6.8.7-7: 1435 files, 22M, built in 108 seconds

Run ImageMagick display

$ display pencil.png

Discover other options with brew info imagemagick

$ brew info imagemagick
imagemagick stable 6.8.7-7 (bottled), HEAD http://www.imagemagick.org /usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick/6.8.7-7 (1435 files, 22M)
* Built from source with: --with-x11
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/commits/master/Library/Formula/imagemagick.rb
==> Dependencies Build: pkg-config ✔
Required: libtool ✔ Recommended: jpeg ✔, libpng ✔, freetype ✔
Optional: fontconfig ✘, libtiff ✘, little-cms ✘, little-cms2 ✘, jasper ✘, libwmf ✘, librsvg ✘, liblqr ✘, openexr ✘, ghostscript ✘, webp ✘
==> Options
  --with-fontconfig Build with fontconfig support
  --with-ghostscript Build with ghostscript support
  --with-jasper Build with jasper support
  --with-liblqr Build with liblqr support
  --with-librsvg Build with librsvg support
  --with-libtiff Build with libtiff support
  --with-libwmf Build with libwmf support
  --with-little-cms Build with little-cms support
  --with-little-cms2 Build with little-cms2 support
  --with-openexr Build with openexr support
  --with-perl enable build/install of PerlMagick
  --with-quantum-depth-16 Compile with a quantum depth of 16 bit
  --with-quantum-depth-32 Compile with a quantum depth of 32 bit
  --with-quantum-depth-8 Compile with a quantum depth of 8 bit
  --with-webp Build with webp support
  --with-x11 Build with x11 support
  --without-freetype Build without freetype support
  --without-jpeg Build without jpeg support
  --without-libpng Build without libpng support
  --without-magick-plus-plus disable build/install of Magick++ --HEAD install HEAD version`