Unable to grant Calendar permission

[peterloron]

MacBook Pro M1 Max, MacOS 26.5 Beta (25F5068a). I installed ical 0.9.0 via brew. When I run a command requiring access to the calendar (e.g. ical today), I get an error:

Calendar access denied. Grant access in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Calendars

This is expected as no permission has been granted. However, when looking in the Calendars permission section, there is no option for ical, and no permission dialog came up.

I'm unable to grant permission for ical, so I'm unable to use it.

[peterloron]

I ran across this elsewhere. Might be the underlying reason.

macOS 26 requires CLI binaries to be code-signed with hardened runtime (--options runtime) for the TCC system to show calendar permission dialogs. Without it, requestFullAccessToEvents() silently returns granted=false with no error, and no dialog is shown.

[BRO3886]

I'll have to purchse Apple Developer License 😢

@peterloron for now you can clone and run a go build if you want to try it out. Apologies, let me see if it makes sense to purchase the license

[CVirus]

same issue here

[CVirus]

Claude Code helped me investigate the issue:

On macOS 26.4.1, VSCode's integrated terminal cannot get Calendar permission. Same machine, same ical binary, but every other terminal I tested prompts and works normally. The difference is right there in each app's code signature:

App	com.apple.security.personal-information.calendars	Works with ical
Terminal.app	✓	✓
iTerm	✓	✓
Zed	✓	✓
kitty	✓	✓
VSCode	✗ (no personal-information entitlements at all)	✗

You can verify this yourself for any app:

codesign -d --entitlements - /Applications/<App>.app 2>&1 | grep -A1 personal-information

macOS attributes the TCC request to the responsible process — the GUI app at the top of the process chain. When the responsible process lacks the required entitlement, tccd suppresses the prompt entirely. Confirmed live in the log:

Policy disallows prompt for Sub:{com.microsoft.VSCode}Resp:{com.microsoft.VSCode...}; access to kTCCServiceCalendar denied

No dialog, no row in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Calendars, no way to add VSCode through any user-visible path. tccutil reset doesn't help.

The old laptop works because its TCC.db has an existing com.microsoft.VSCode row that pre-dates the current policy enforcement. New laptops without a pre-existing grant can no longer create one.

Workaround: run ical from any properly-entitled terminal (iTerm, Terminal.app, Zed, kitty) instead of VSCode.

[CVirus]

Related ticket: microsoft/vscode#307364