Cannot save keybindings when using free version on macOS

[bdash]

Discussed in #7252

^{Originally posted by awildbobcat August 11, 2025}
Hi,
I'm unable to save any edit to the keybindings when running the .app bundle directly.
This works fine when running the executable directly /Applications/Binary Ninja.app/Contents/MacOS/binaryninja.

In both cases, the user configuration file in ~/Library/Application Support/Binary Ninja/keybindings.json seems to be ignored.

When running the executable directly and editing the bindings, a keybinding.json file is created in the current working directory from where the executable was launched.

I suspect that the keybindings.json file is read from and written to using the current working directory. When running the app bundle, the current working directory is set by the OS to a read-only directory, preventing me from saving my bindings.

Running sudo fs_usage -w | grep -i keybindings.json -C1 and opening a new Binary Ninja process suggests a relative path is used:

0.000001   binaryninja.229398
21:45:55.384608  stat64                 [  2]           keybindings.json

I am using the latest free version (5.1.8005) on MacOS 15.5.

---

Specifically this happens due to the fallback logic within BinaryNinja::GetPathRelativeToUserDirectory:

binaryninja-api/binaryninjaapi.cpp

Lines 177 to 179 in cde1c38

	char* path = BNGetPathRelativeToUserDirectory(rel.c_str());
	if (!path)
	return rel;

BNGetPathRelativeToUserDirectory returns nullptr in the free version, so this ends up returning a path relative to the current working directory.

[hannahfluch]

I am using binaryninja-free on NixOS. The same issue persists for me too.