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.

18 comments:

Lux said...

That worked you rock! Love the application and can't use my Mac without it.

aki said...

Agreed—still the best of its kind, after all these years … thank you for keeping it going!

mattahan said...

just echoing above sentiments, my Mac feels broken without xgestures

Ed said...

I had a sudden panic after installing 11.6 (skipped 11.5) and finding xGestures non-functional - and kicking myself for not checking before upgrading. Glad you're still keeping it going - couldn't live without it.

mstoops said...

I don't think I ever looked to see if you'd made a 64-bit version after I installed Catalina, since the updates were few and far between. But man have I missed it since 1.78 stopped working a couple years ago. I've been using a gesture plugin for Firefox for a while, but lament not having them system-wide. Luckily I got sentimental tonight and Ducked it to see if it was still "alive," and Holy Cow it is! There may be only 5 of us users, but we're the happiest, most productive Mac mouse-users there are. Thank you for keeping XG alive, looking forward to future updates.

(I looked in 1Password, where I keep everything, and found my XGestures license from 2012, but I feel I started using before even that. I even emailed you at one point, when you were still at Hampshire [my sister and both her sons went there].)

Cheers!

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for xgestures and your dedication!
I really can't live without it :)

Unknown said...

Recently I updated my Air M1 to Monterey and after the update xgestures is randomly stopping working. Like I click start, it is running for some time but then it stops and I have to start it again.

Anonymous said...

I'm on Monterey and the xGesture service will not automatically start on login. I have to manually start it by going to the options tab of the preference pane.

mstoops said...

Monterey users: did you make sure to run step 2, the `xattr` in Brian’s instructions above. If you did, and it’s still not working properly, open up the `console` app and see you see anything in the system log file.

Anonymous said...

I installed xGestures for all users so I had to change the command in step 2:

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

Now it works, thanks mstoops

Brian Kendall said...

Good catch on needing to change the command for people who installed the pref pane for all users.

I've modified the blog post for cover that, as well as mentioning that this might be needed for people who upgrade to Monterey.

Unknown said...

I don't know if command was supposed to fix my issue with xgestures randomly stopping working but I tried it anyway and still have it. Any suggestions why is it happening?

M1 Air - Monterey 12.0.1

Anonymous said...

Helped me solve my problem running xgestures on mac os 11.6 , Thanks!

Volkan said...

I came to your website from your only question about TRRS jacks, and already a fan of your xGestures program!

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Thank you so much, Brian! I couldn't live without xGestures.

Unfortunately, it seems to crash a few times per day on M1 with Rosetta and I have to go into the PrefPane and relaunch it. But I don't care!!! It's still the best software on my Mac by far!!

Anonymous said...

Hey Brian, I am new mac user and the day I started using my macbook with mouse, I understood that using mac without the gestures is so damn difficult.
xgestures is a really awesome application and I can't thank you enough for this.
The fact that you are still finding time to support this is just brilliant.

Thanks again :)

Manuel said...

Hey man. THank you so much for this. I come from Windows and I find macos awful without this. I mostly use it for switching between spaces as if I was using my fingers (but with right mouse button).

I moved to monterrey and thanks to this post I solved mostly the issues. But there is also a bug. When I repeatedly click the middle button, the app crashes.

again. Thank you man for this,

Manuel