[chimerax-users] macOS Catalina gives PermissionError opening files

[Tom Goddard]

I believe ChimeraX is working ok with macOS Catalina and ChimeraX will work fine if you upgrade to Catalina.  I am currently using ChimeraX on a Mac laptop and iMac.

macOS Catalina introduces new security measures where you must give permission to each app to allow access to Desktop, Downloads, Documents folders and to external disk drives.  So you will encounter this using ChimeraX, a permission dialog will appear to allow opening data for each of the different folders.  It only asks one time for each folder, so it is not too burdensome.

Previously I encountered file permission errors when opening files in ChimeraX on Catalina, but I was not able to reproduce those errors.  I think they may have been related to starting ChimeraX in a strange way, from a shell within Emacs.

	Tom



> On Oct 14, 2019, at 10:46 PM, Tom Goddard wrote:
> 
> 
> If you are thinking of upgrading to the new macOS Catalina (10.15) and want to use ChimeraX on it you might hold off.
> 
> We have found that opening files using the ChimeraX open command or the recent files thumbnails often causes PermissionError and fails to open the files.  This is caused by a new macOS Catalina security feature when any app that tries to open a file under Desktop, Downloads, or Documents must first raise a permission dialog asking if the app is allowed to open files from that directory.  When using the ChimeraX File / Open dialog (from the File menu) the permission dialog is shown and works.  But if you use the ChimeraX open command of recent files thumbnails on directories that you have not granted permission for with the Open dialog, then those fail with PermissionError -- apparently those methods of opening are not able to show the permission dialog.
> 
> Other applications (e.g. photo editing program Gimp) have the same problem.  We do not yet know how to solve this.
> 
> 	Tom
> 
> 
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