khr898/ntfsmac

ntfsmac lets Mac computers with Apple Silicon chips read and write NTFS drives, the disk format Windows uses, without needing a kernel extension or turning off macOS security protections. macOS normally has no native way to write to NTFS drives, and the usual workarounds involve either a kernel extension, which newer macOS security policy blocks, or a paid third party driver. Instead, ntfsmac takes a different approach. It runs a small, disposable Linux virtual machine in the background that does the actual NTFS reading and writing using a Linux tool called ntfs-3g. That virtual machine then shares the drive back to macOS over a standard network file sharing protocol, using a private, host only network bridge. From the Mac's point of view, it just looks like a normal mounted network drive, so there is no kernel extension to install and no System Integrity Protection setting to change. The tool comes as a command line interface first, with a menu bar app as a second option that has no icon in the Dock. From the command line you can mount a specific disk, unmount it, run a diagnostic check on the whole setup, or fully uninstall the tool and its background helper. The menu bar app shows the mount status through its icon color: grey when idle, blue while mounting, green once mounted and writable, yellow if mounted read only because of a dirty journal, and red on error. Every privileged action, such as mounting or touching network routing state, goes through a dedicated helper process rather than the app directly calling sudo, which keeps the amount of code running with elevated permissions as small as possible. The project only works on Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 13 or newer, with no support for Intel Macs. It is signed with an ad hoc signature rather than a paid Apple developer certificate, which is why the GUI is distributed as a downloadable disk image rather than through the Homebrew package manager's official channel, and the command line tool lives in the author's own separate Homebrew tap. ntfsmac is released under the MIT license, and the project is currently in active development.