Turning off Accessibility for Ghostty Crashes Mac

[tuladhar]

Description

When the Accessibility permission for Ghostty is disabled, the Mac crashes immediately. The issue seems to be linked to the Accessibility settings for Ghostty, as disabling this feature causes the system to freeze.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Install and launch Ghostty on macOS.
2. Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility
3. Find Ghostty under the Accessibility section and enable the permission.
4. Turn off the Accessibility permission for Ghostty.
5. Observe the Mac crashing upon turning off the permission.

Expected Behavior

Turning off the Accessibility permission for Ghostty should not cause the Mac to crash. The app should either remain functional or prompt the user with an appropriate error message.

Actual Behavior

When the Accessibility permission is turned off, the Mac crashes.

System Information

• macOS Version: Sonoma 14.5
• Ghostty Version: 1.0.0 (build: 8469, commit: 4b4d406)
• Hardware: Apple M1 Pro

[edrozenberg]

Mac mini M4 Sequoia 15.2 (24C101).

No crash, but toggling the perm multiple times and triggering a global shortcut did cause the Mac to temporarily freeze, was eventually able to quit Ghostty and everything seems back to normal.

Note that standard Mac behavior is to only ask for perms once, probably to prevent "harassment" from repeated perms requests. If you enable then disable the Accessibility perms subsequently there won't be any further prompts, the user would need to remember to toggle the perms on again to make global things work, the OS will not remind again.

If the Mac crashes that would be an OS issue, opening a ticket in Apple Developer feedback will ensure that nobody from Apple ever responds, but maybe when enough people complain Apple would pay attention after a decade :). Many of my dozens of Apple issues are still present many years later.