For the lonely and tourtured souls that have to tread this path: There is hope: I was able to get a XCode project to run a custom, cross-platform CMake build using a custom build script and custom project settings... APPLE THIS SHOULD BE A DEFAULT TEMPLATE BTW To begin you need to use canonical paths in any custom build script. You can get the path to your llvm toolset by xcodebuild -find [tool] and just copying the pathname. Relevant tools here are clang, clang++, and lldb for the compilers and debugger. Next Step: write somthing in zsh or bash to call cmake and make your project in the build folder. not too hard -- I linked mine to pastebin and that should be good for most projects if you follow cmake standards. You can modify it as needed. Next click on your project in the sidebar and check your targets: yes xcode probably already has one, and it's stupid - trash it. Make a new, custom target. Go to the info tabs and set the command to your custom command and set the arguments and working directory appropriately. Now Everything should build nice and sweet. Run it to test. If somthing is wrong with your toolset or build script it should rear its ugly head, but odds are it should work just fine. Now you're gonna want to debug. Because of our custom target, xcode has conveniently forgotten what to run. Let's tell it by opening up our scheme. To do this you'll need to first add the executable to the project. With the project built "add files..." in the sidebar and add your executable from the build directory directly to your project. Now we can tell xcode to run it: click on product on the menu bar and go to scheme then edit scheme. Jump to the run section on the left hand side and select your executable. It is done. Personal note to Apple: This should be easier. This is literally the simplest case for a C++ project and yet it took quite a lot of moving things around to get working.

If you're referring to RecoveryOS (achieved by holding CMD+R on intel cpu models and the power button on apple silicon models during startup), then you should call apple support. This question is not appropriate for the developer forums.

Are you targeting aarm64?

First of all use of emojis offends my sensibilities... that is all. As for $path you should edit ~/.zshrc and add whatever directories you need to the path variable. example: # a common directory on the user $path: path+=/Users/username/bin #this is often used by users that need a place for custom bash/zsh scripts or just compiled programs. ;) This will execute every time a user logs in. As a side-note: if you do have a ~/bin directory you should probably sudo chmod -R 711 ~/bin...