Auto-Mount Metal Toolchain Using a Launch Service Because Xcode 26 Cannot

Jan 14th, 2026

Xcode 26 introduced a bug where for some people, me included, Metal shaders won’t compile because the Metal toolchain won’t be managed by Xcode properly, no matter how often you reinstall the toolchain. Some fixes include moving the toolchain into a folder Xcode can see without having to mount anything. Others replace the ExportMetadata.plist exposed version.

I can fix this by mounting the Metal toolchain’s disk image manually. That sucks, but doesn’t break on every update of Xcode or Metal and doesn’t require any fiddling with the files or finding out the expected version string.

So that I don’t forget to do this after rebooting, I wrote a Launch Service that does this after reboot, when /Volumes/ changes, and every 5min for good measure :)

The code: https://codeberg.org/ctietze/metal-toolchain-launchd-automount

If you’re not comfortable fiddling with Launch Services/launchd, the repo includes basic shell scripts to install/uninstall the service for you.

Manually Mount the Metal Toolchain When Xcode Cannot

Jan 7th, 2026

My Xcode 26.2 still suffers from an inability to compile Metal shader files because it can’t find the Metal toolchain: error: cannot execute tool ‘metal’ due to missing Metal Toolchain; use: xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain That command also doesn’t do anything to fix this for me. But I did have success mounting the .dmg file with the toolchain manually.

Emacs Carnival 2026-01: “This Year, I’ll …”

Jan 5th, 2026

Welcome to 2026, and a new year of Emacs Blog Carnival post! To start the Gregorian calendar year fresh, the blogging/writing/thinking prompt of this month is: This year, I’ll … What will you do differently in Emacs this year? Or will you just get started? Why? What are you excited about to explore and tinker with? What do you want to perfect?

Announcing the German Urban Sketchers Index

Jan 3rd, 2026

Happy 2026! Let’s start the year with something fun. The internet shortly became the place of love and joy and sharing that I remember it for: a volunteer who found all (?) Urban Sketching groups in Germany, official and unofficial, reached out to me to send social media links and contact details he found so I include them on the spartan overview page I maintained.