Help resolving issues in a MacOS-Shortcut bundled using `menuinst`

[VasanthakumarV]

I help maintain a feedstock for a Terminal Emulator called Alacritty, recently I received an issue regarding the app bundled for MacOS, the issues are the following,

• Alacritty not inheriting the System-default for the Theme
• Alacritty not maximizing to cover the whole page
• The menu option Alacritty -> About Alacritty not showing the version number

(the issue page has videos for all of the issues)

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Doing the following resolves all of the issues mentioned above,

• Replacing the contents of ~/Applications/Alacritty.app/Contents/MacOS/ with the actual binary that gets called by the shell script (alacritty-script)
• Adding the following entries to the Info.plist file

  <key>NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance</key>
  <string>NO</string>
  <key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>
  <true/>

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I was hoping I could get some help resolving these issues directly via menuinst and not rely on manually manipulating the installed files.

This is the file I used to configure menuinst for Alacritty: menu.json, I have been going through the menuinst-reference to understand if I have missed something, but haven't made any breakthroughs.

I was hoping you would be able to offer help, that might steer me in the right direction. I would greatly appreciate any and all assistance.

[VasanthakumarV]

I was able to replicate 2/3 issues in an intel-mac-air with Sonoma (14.7.5). (wasn't able to replicate the fullscreen issue, it could be because of my low screen resolution).

[marcoesters]

What you are asking for is currently not implemented in menuinst, unfortunately, so there isn't much you can do yet.

The way these NS* keys are currently handled doesn't scale. #195 already described the same issue (I resurrected it as it got auto-closed for inactivity), but I think we need to remove the hard-coded schema keys and replace it with something looser.

As for the binary being invoked directly instead of via a script, I will have to think about a heuristic or need to introduce a new schema property that allows you to indicate whether this is a binary or needs script execution.

Thanks for providing the menu.json file - that will help a lot with testing these changes!

[VasanthakumarV]

Thanks for looking into this.

[VasanthakumarV]

Hi @marcoesters,

I wanted to add the following,

Replacing the compiled-c-binary and the shell-script, with a hard-link to the alacritty binary solves the issues as well. (provided the info.plist file has the additional, currently unsupported attributes)

I don't know the downsides of hard-linking files, but wanted to provide this additional info, just in case.

[VasanthakumarV]

Looks like menuinst allows us to link binary files inside the app folder, when I did that it seems to fix all of the issues we are facing. (conda-forge/alacritty-feedstock#7). (even without the additional plist attributes).

Edit

NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance & NSHighResolutionCapable are still required,
but the changes I mentioned about wanting the binary file directly inside the Application folder may not be needed (since menuinst allows linking the binary file inside the Application folder).

[VasanthakumarV]

Hi @marcoesters, #195 is what we need as well (I hope it will cover NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance & NSHighResolutionCapable), you can close this issue as a duplicate.