This is another one of those posts that are of interest only to folks using Emacs on macOS. For some time, the Emacs menus haven’t been working right for me on macOS. In previous versions of Emacs/macOS, there would be significant delay before a menu would activate. With Emacs 27.1/Catalina, it requires two clicks on a menu to activate it. I use the menus so seldomly that I’ve never bothered to investigate the matter.
Serendipity intervened, though, and I’ve discovered the cause of this problem and how to fix it. Well, actually, I did neither but st3fan complained on reddit about the problem and MorningtonCroissant explained that it’s a result of the Mac’s privacy control mechanism. The answer is to enable Emacs control of the computer—see the reddit post for the details.
That’s not the end of the story though. I already had this enabled and Emacs (or perhaps macOS) was still requiring two clicks. Onetom commented that it might be necessary to remove and add Emacs from the permission list because the permission might still be pointing at an old copy of Emacs. I did that and everything starting working just fine.
Again, this has low importance for me because I don’t use the menus much but if you are an Emacser on macOS and having problems with the menus, take a look at the reddit post and see if it clears it up for you.