I already filed a ticket before this posting. https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/feedback/13633103 But I am not sure if it's publicly viewable.

Okay forget this. I found out the answer myself. I should use \h+$.

I had wrong method name in initial post. - (void)awakeFromNib { //NSApp.activationPolicy = NSApplicationActivationPolicyProhibited; self.window.isVisible = NO; } It seems setting isVisible to "NO" does not work - the window still shows.

I forgot to mention that my tests are done on the old XIB project because my app was created long ago before storyboard was invented. I tested again on my old MBP with Xcode 14.2 and macOS 12.7.6 (Monterey). Either combination works: Leave "Visible at Launch" checked (default) in IB and self.window.isVisible = NO in awakeFromNib Uncheck "Visible at Launch" in IB and self.window.isVisible = YES in awakeFromNib I believe there are some minor changes at the lower OS level that break this "old" behavior.

Actually when it comes to the real world, things become even weird. In the App Store app project, I unchecked "Visible at Launch" but when I debug/run the app, the main window still shows. It's even true after I comment out awakeFromNib in which I do lots of initialization work.

Mystical event happens when I debug the following code: - (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification *)aNotification { [NSOperationQueue.mainQueue addOperationWithBlock:^{ [self.mainWC setup]; }]; } I add a watch self.window.visible and set 2 breakpoints: one at the addOperationWithBlock line and the other inside the block. When the first breakpoint is hit, self.window.visible is NO. But as soon as the second breakpoint is hit, self.window.visible becomes YES. In IB "Visible at Launch" is unchecked for the main window. I have tried clean and rebuild but to no avail. But I cannot reproduce this in a newly created project with similar XIB setup. Does anyone else have such a bizarre situation like mine?

After many hours of digging, it turned out that another possible bug caused this weird problem. It seems AppDelegate applicationShouldHandleReopen is always called no matter if there is an existing running instance. This is true no matter if a project is created using XIB based style or new storyboard style; it's also not related to languages (OBJC or Swift). I verified this on newly created projects. My app has some custom actions to do in applicationShouldHandleReopen that eventually shows the main window. Since now it's called unconditionally, it will show main window on launch. I also verified on my old MBP, applicationShouldHandleReopen is NOT called on app launching during debugging. Is this applicationShouldHandleReopen behavior by design on new macOS versions (13+)?

More on applicationShouldHandleReopen. it appears that it is called only during debugging. For normal/direct run (double click in Finder) and observe messages in Console, I don't see any: - (BOOL)applicationShouldHandleReopen:(NSApplication *)sender hasVisibleWindows:(BOOL)hasVisibleWindows { NSLog(@"%s %d", __func__, hasVisibleWindows); return NO; }

BTW, it works perfectly in the old Xcode 14.2 version.

Here is the bug ticket.

I filed a bug report here.

The project links against one framework and library that was built from my own projects. Now I believe I need to rebuild them using current version of Xcode.

The problem is that older Xcode versions did not call this method when I start debugging. Of course, after app finishes launching, when I click app icon in doc, the app will receive this callback.

Same problem here. Please fix it ASAP, maybe via a hotfix.

Surprisingly, after disabling hotspot indexing, the world becomes peaceful and calm. Now whenever I click a link in the quick help pane, the docs navigation pane immediately locates the context where the link is about. It had been non-functioning for the past several versions!