Re: emacsformacos: cannot access mac folders: Documents/Downloads

[Pankaj Jangid <pankaj@codeisgreat.org>]

Uwe Brauer <oub@mat.ucm.es> writes:

>>>> "EZ" == Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> From: Daniel Martín <mardani29@yahoo.es>
>>> Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2021 03:25:11 +0100
>>> 
>>> The reason is a security protection in recent versions of macOS where
>>> you need to grant explicit permission to applications if you want them
>>> to access your personal folders.  Go to System Preferences, Security &
>>> Privacy, Privacy, Full Disk Access.  Note that the Emacs launcher on
>>> macOS is actually a Ruby script, so you'd need to add /usr/bin/ruby
>>> there.
>
>> Should this information be in the Emacs user manual?
>
>
> Not sure, if you compile from master then this problem does not occur it
> seems to be more of a emacsformacosx thing

This problem used to occur, about 6-months ago, every time I built a new
binary. Have we changed something in Emacs to circumvent that? At least
I don’t remember such a change.

On my side, I have changed how I access Emacs. Earlier I used to start
from macos terminal program. And now I just copy the
‘nextstep/Emacs.app’ to ‘~/Applications/Emacs.app’, and launch from
Launchpad.

As I am writing this, I have tried to build new binary and launched from
command line. Now that is also working without any problem.

All this may be happening because of following:

1. New macos was release in the mean time and it probably has new
   persistent settings for ‘~/Application/Emacs.app’ even if the user
   changes binary.

2. There are more settings for ‘Files and Folders’ with respect to
   ‘Terminal’ program. These new settings may be allowing anything
   launched from terminal.

What should we add to user manual?

Ideal use-case for a user should be to use the ‘nextstep/Emacs.app’
application. Like other applications in macos. But user may have
downloaded pre-built binary from emacsformacosx.com, as the case in
this thread. So,

“Copy the freshly built ‘nextstep/Emacs.app’ to your ‘Applications’
directory. Go to System Preferences, Security & Privacy, Privacy, Full
Disk Access. Allow ‘Emacs.app’ to access your file-system.

Or, if you have downloaded a pre-built binary from emacsformacosx.com
then allow ‘/usr/bin/ruby’ to access your file-system.”

-- 
Regards,
Pankaj Jangid