macOS and Cheese

2026-01-16, Fri

This post intends to keep track of problems & solutions I've collected from macOS.

1. No Need for Xcode

Unless you really enjoy the GUI workflow provided by the Xcode IDE, most of the time it's only the CLI tools that we need for development. In this case, this is all you need:

xcode-select --install

2. Symlink of Python3

While trying to make symlink of python3 like this:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/python

The following error pops up

$python 
xcode-select: Failed to locate 'python', requesting installation of command line developer tools.

In this case, try to link directly from the actual source, e.g.

sudo ln -s $(xcode-select -p)/usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/python

which should get the job done.

3. Open Anyway

Aside from go to System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Security, we can also run

xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine /path/to/app

to remove the quarantine attribute from the application.

4. Man Page Warning

The following warning message: "This manpage is not compatible with mandoc(1) and might display incorrectly." shows up while viewing manul of tools installed through brew. This warning message occurs because macOS switched man page renderer from groff to mandoc, which doesn't support some GNU-specific formatting macros.

5. Clear GitHub credentials

When the personal access token expires, you could clear the stored credentials through following command

$ git credential-osxkeychain erase
host=github.com
protocol=https