Sunday, August 29, 2021

What the? A blog post! xGestures and macOS 11.5.2 (and Monterey)

Hello everybody!

I've been getting a lot of emails from people about how xGestures stops working after updating the macOS 11.5.2 (and also Monterey). It seems that Apple has once again changed something subtle about how the various security thingamajigs in the system operate, and the upshot here is that anyone who installed the xGestures pref pane in such a way that it still has the "quarantine" flag on it will find that the pref pane can no longer launch xGestures itself.

Without any further ado, here is the fix:

1. Open Terminal (or your favorite terminal app like iTerm2)

2. Execute the following commands (note that they should each be a single line even though the blog post may break it into two):

xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/PreferencePanes/xGestures.prefPane
xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Library/PreferencePanes/xGestures.prefPane 

(One of the two of those should do it, depending on whether you installed xGestures for all users or just the current user account.) 

3. Try relaunching xGestures

At some point I'll release a new version of xGestures that addresses this issue. I've also recently discovered and fixed a crash that was introduced in version 1.80, so I definitely owe you all a new version with that fix. I'll try to make it a proper universal app too so that it doesn't need to run in Rosetta on an Apple Silicon mac.

Even though I still don't have a lot of time to work on xGestures, I'll go ahead and reaffirm that I intend to keep it working going into the future so long as there is still no other mouse gesture app that works as well as it does. And even with it being as old and somewhat kludgy as it is, so far there isn't.