The mechanism used in the ns port of emacs to cancel menu tracking, and to post a CGEvent to resume it after menus have been updated via lisp no longer works on recent macOS versions.
The cause of this bug is due to Apple tightening security in macOS, and no longer allowing apps to post arbitrary CGEvents to the system.
You can observe a console message on macOS Catalina when the first click fails: "Sender is prohibited from synthesizing events".
A proposed fix is included inline below, using a newer API 'CGEventPostToPid' instead of CGEventPost. The newer API accepts a pid specifying the recipient, and when the recipient is the same pid as the sending process, the event gets posted successfully.
Note: the newer API is only available in macOS versions 10.11 and greater.
David
Fix more menu bar requires 2 clicks (bug#34213)
diff --git a/src/nsterm.m b/src/nsterm.m
index 3ce2233..4dbe1c2 100644
--- a/src/nsterm.m
+++ b/src/nsterm.m
@@ -4523,7 +4523,7 @@ in certain situations (rapid incoming events).
menu_mouse_point,
kCGMouseButtonLeft);
CGEventSetType (event, kCGEventLeftMouseDown);
- CGEventPost (kCGHIDEventTap, event);
+ CGEventPostToPid([NSProcessInfo processInfo].processIdentifier, event);
CFRelease (event);
CFRelease (source);