Re: Gitk doesn't work on macOS Mojave

From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: Jul 19, 2018, 19:12 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPig+cT+Z-hN6WidMOUW2jRVNFovvv03LEFESXpr05NKmpnWAA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <D295145E-7596-4409-9681-D8ADBB9EBB0C@me.com>

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 2:48 PM Evgeny Cherpak <cherpake@me.com> wrote:

> You have probably heard this by now already, but gitk doesn’t work on macOS 10.14 - because it uses Apple Events,
> And apps on 10.14 require user to give them permissions to control other apps with Apple Events.

This hasn't been reported, so thanks for bringing it up.

Show 8 quoted lines

> Here is what I get when I try running it on my machine with beta 4 installed:
>
> Error in startup script: 58:102: execution error: Not authorized to send Apple events to System Events. (-1743)
>     while executing
> "exec osascript -e [format {
>         tell application "System Events"
>             set frontmost of processes whose unix id is %d to true
>         end te..."

Fortunately, this feature is merely a convenience, not otherwise critical to gitk functioning. It would be ideal if someone running Mojave could devise up a patch to work around the problem (either by skipping this code on Mojave or discovering a different way to bring the application to the foreground). An alternative would be to revert 76bf6ff93e (gitk: On OSX, bring the gitk window to front, 2013-04-24), which introduced this code.

(Note, however, that the gitk project is dormant, so it's not clear if such a patch will be picked up.)