TextMate News

Anything vaguely related to TextMate and macOS.

Logitech Control Center

Seems the infamous Logitech Control Center is back to wreak havoc.

They released a 2.4 update on the 20th of November and a week later a “mate error” thread surfaced on the mailing list, I have received a dozen support emails about the problem, and if you look at the comments for LCC at VersionTracker or MacUpdate, you’ll find that a lot of users are reporting problems with this update.

So my advice: uninstall LCC. And on a more general note, if something has worked fine for a year, and it suddenly breaks, consider what you did to alter your system in the last week before you write support, thanks! :)

General

42 Comments

29 November 2007

by fredB

Regarding 3rd party mouse drivers, beside the well known USBOverdrive and SteerMouse, ControllerMate is really worth checking. For 15$ you can configure input devices in every possible way. Stunning.

29 November 2007

by James

So my advice: uninstall LCC. And on a more general note, if something has worked fine for a year, and it suddenly breaks, consider what you did to alter your system in the last week before you write support, thanks! :)

Seems to me if I did something to alter my system in a good way (i.e. drivers) and then your software breaks, you should be the one getting support emails.

29 November 2007

by Adam W

James : Do you truly believe that drivers can only add “good” behavior. Poorly written drivers are just as likely to behave badly as poorly written applications. If anything drivers are even more notorious, as you tend to be even more dependent on them working correctly. I’m not surprised at all these days that logitech is continuing to release poor quality mac “drivers”. I put that in quotations, as from what I’ve read, the last round depended on a hack (APE) instead of being a proper driver.

29 November 2007

by Dan

@james: “Seems to me if I did something to alter my system in a good way (i.e. drivers)…”

If you think that downloading of new versions of drivers is altering your system in a good way, when suddenly stable software becomes unstable, you really need to revise your definition of “good.”

If you ate out-of-date shrimp and promptly fell ill, would you blame the shrimp, or your digestive system?

29 November 2007

by Russell

Sigh. You don’t write a lot of software, do you, James?

Look at it this way: what makes you think that adding a hardware driver is automatically “good”? Or that TextMate’s breaking afterwards is automatically TextMate’s fault? Those drivers don’t come from Apple, and Allan has no way of predicting what effect they’ll have on the system.

More to the point, if you make a change to your system and something breaks, you should at least make mention of that in your problem report. How else will the programmer know where to look, instead of just blindly stabbing around in the dark?

29 November 2007

by Jane

I installed LCC to troubleshoot mouse issues with my mx revolution and to amuse Logitech tech support, and bitching about all of this (LCC sucking, it using APE (!?!?!?!), LCC causing apps to crash and behave weirdly) did absolutely nothing.

Wish they’d hire some competent people to do a good job, not to come up with some utter and annoying hack to accommodate for their incompetency. They have some awesome folks working on the hardware though..love their mice so much, almost nobody else compares.

30 November 2007

by Vorsicht: Logitech Control Center - apfelquak

[…] die sich letztendlich als ein Problem mit dem LCC herauskristallisieren. So geschehen bei Macromates, dem Hersteller von […]

30 November 2007

by Stephen

logitech just can’t make drivers that work. its not a mac specific issue. the SetPoint driver on windows is useless. random bt dropouts and random key sticking/delays are common place.

i’ve stopped using the mx1000 at home and now use a RadTech BT600 and i love it!

30 November 2007

by Chris

Hey James,

LCC installs Unsanity’s APE into your system. APE has a history of wreaking havoc everywhere. It’s most recent high-profile victim is Leopard. Daring Fireball has a blog post that might make things clearer on just how bad APE can be.

http://daringfireball.net/2007/10/blue_in_the_face

Anyway, try getting rid of LCC and going with USBOverdrive. In fact, the Daring Fireball post tells you exactly what files you need to delete to uninstall APE. Alternately, you can download APE from Unsanity’s site, run the installer and select Uninstall.

05 December 2007

by Colin

LCC’s new update seems to ditch APE Thank god

05 December 2007

by Dongyi == 冬屹 » Logitech Control Center 2.4: a new way to break your system

[…] installed Logitech Control Center 2.4 on Mac OS X 10.5.1 today. Not surprised I am getting this (already being made famous) […]

07 December 2007

by Ian

Greetings.

As others have discovered, installing the latest LCC driver kills my command-line “mate” command. Unfortunately, I need the LCC driver for a Logitech keyboard, not for a mouse; without the driver, the option and command keys are interchanged. I can’t just generically re-map those, either, because this is for external keyboards for a laptop that I cart back and forth between home and work, and I use a Logitech keyboard at home and an Adesso at work. The LCC driver seems smart enough to do its thing for the Logitech keyboard but not for the Adesso.

Does any one have any suggestions for something I can use in place of the LCC “driver”, short of replacing my Logitech keyboard?

Thanks, :ian

07 December 2007

by fredB

ian,

As I wrote in the first answer on this thread, check ControllerMate, really.

11 December 2007

by Dave Bayer

I can’t live without the side buttons on my Logitech mouse, for switching apps and toggling drawer states, so uninstalling Logitech is not an option on the table.

I simply added the line

alias textmate="open -a TextMate"

to my .bash_profile, and I’m not looking back. OS X does come with man pages, people! I must say, I’m baffled as to why TextMate offers a custom “mate” command that is so fragile, when “open -a” is an option?

11 December 2007

by Allan Odgaard

Dave: The reasons for the mate shell command are in the manual (which also mentions open -a TextMate).

And you should be baffled by Logitech’s poor code review, not by how fragile a program is to having untested code injected into its runtime environment.

FYI the Logitech Control Center also breaks the osascript shell command and a plethora of other things like Growl notifications.

12 December 2007

by Peter Wagenet

Deleting /Libary/InputManagers/LCC Scroll Enhancer Loader fixed both the issues with TextMate and with Growl. The only expense I’ve found is slightly rougher scrolling which is something I can easily live with.

12 December 2007

by Peter Wagenet

Correction: this only appears to fix the Growl issue. I’m pretty sure that I did get “mate” working at some point but it isn’t any longer. My apologies.

12 December 2007

by Peter Wagenet

Removing /Library/ScriptingAdditions/LCC Scroll Enhancer as well and then logging out now makes “mate” fully functional as far as I can tell. I don’t think I lost any other functionality.

20 December 2007

by Lionhart

It’s LCC, nothing to do with Textmate. The problem is also caused when using Linkinus. They need to fix LCC, not the other way around.

20 December 2007

by Matt Pounsett

For those trying to figure out how to get rid of LCC, there’s a simple set of instructions here for removing it from your system. It references a couple of files that aren’t in the latest version of LCC, so don’t be concerned if you go to delete something and it’s already missing. Reboot when you’re done, and you’re golden.

02 January 2008

by Marc Charbonneau’s Blog » Logitech Control Center no longer installs APE

[…] I moved to Leopard. If you’re not familiar with APE, have a look at Daring Fireball and the TextMate Blog for a few reasons why you probably don’t want it installed on your […]

12 January 2008

by Dave Bayer

Here is the Logitech URL for emailing requests for technical support: Logitech “email us”

Anyone who cares about this issue has a direct responsibility to write them and assert the urgency of a need for a fix. It’s amazing that there’s no update from Logitech yet on this!

08 February 2008

by Josh

“And on a more general note, if something has worked fine for a year, and it suddenly breaks, consider what you did to alter your system in the last week before you write support, thanks! :)”

That’s not exactly the best customer support policy. Yes, as end-users, we are responsible for what is installed on our systems, but “What the fuck did you do, dummy” is not a constructive attitude. That post sounds like it was written out of frustration, which is understandable, but there’s no need to get snippy (and just because you put a smiley face, doesn’t make light and fun).

08 February 2008

by Steven Fisher

Josh: It’s something that really has to be said, and I think it was said rather politely. I have heard so many times people blaming problems on random chance or the wrong piece of software.

One of the more recent was a coworker complaining that all her fonts were messed up. I asked her if she’d installed any fonts recently. She admitted she had, but insisted that wasn’t the problem. Guess what happened when she removed the new fonts? That’s right, everything went back to normal.

In general, people would be much better off if they applied a little problem solving before lashing out and blaming the first someone they can think of.

21 February 2008

by Sergio Ballestrero

Let me put a good word for Steven, even if I’m still unhappy with the “Cut&Paste” problems of Mate: Logitech LCC is trouble. See what it does to AquaTerm too:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.macosx.fink.user/25501

06 March 2008

by Maryann

Okay, I did a Google Search to see what might help for fixing my problems with LCC; I’ve had problems with it since the beginning (I believe it was 2.2.2 when I got my s530 for Mac), but when the new update came out I was THRILLED to see that the problems I had been having with the original should be fixed.

And it was for a while…

Then one day when I tried to change which application it would open with the “Home” key, it opened the Device Manager as normal so I could confiugure the buttons, but when I clicked on “home” a LCC version of the MAC “Lollipop of Doom” showed up and kept going for ten minutes.

After backing up any necessary files I restarted my computer and reinstalled things, including LCC. That was roughly a month ago, and today when I went to do the same thing that I went to do the last time it had a problem (or didn’t as well), the problem started up.

Randomly.

Yes, I uninstalled Apple Mail but it wasn’t being used as the “Mail” application’s thing. In fact, it has been uninstalled for a couple of days before this happened (although I haven’t tried to change applications until now).

Spent a couple hours on the phone with tech support today too… any suggestions? Any alternatives to LCC?

10 March 2008

by Bob Chantler

I have read a great many diverse problems people are having with LCC 2.4 The hardware for the most part works almost OK. I am unable to make use of the numeric keyboard which hangs up my MAC and requires a reboot. No problem with the mouse, only with S530 as indicated. This is the second keyboard logitech sent to me. I need to be able to use the numeric keyboard in my work. It is time Logitech addressed the problem(s). Any one have a solution? Bob C

13 March 2008

by Toby

Just another plug for using ControllerMate to tweak USB input devices. I have only a few that are specific to TextMate, like hijacking the (IMHO) useless Caps Lock and using it to toggle through the tabs in an open project. But I have lots of handy things that I use while I’m in TM, like actually making the pause/play next track keys on my old windows keyboard control itunes by trigger little applescripts (and to control Toolplayer if that’s the media player I have open instead).

18 March 2008

by Nihad Eminovic

My Logitech MX mice is driven by SteerMouse drivers now.

I’ve switched to SteerMouse after LCC drivers started tripping. All of a sudden, my mice would behave like a scroll is activated. Everything would scroll while mouse was over it. Tried to uninstall LCC, but no help. Problem would desapear when I’d kill LCC daemon, so I decided to find and alternative.

27 March 2008

by dennis

the times I have been on windows I remember using a logitech wireless mouse when it still was a brand new feature.

the drivers for that mouse not only were about 35 Mbyte (year 2002 on Win98/Win2000) but I remeber uninstaling it, just a couple of days after first install - I found out I could do the same ‘mouse-button bindings’ with the system preference panel.

logitech isnt releasing only crappy expensive but “soooo darn fancy” hardware, but they still didnt learn how the job is done on software.

I never bought a logitech piece again - no thanks.

(btw: same with intellipoint mouses and drivers of microsoft)

cheers dennis

01 May 2008

by Logitech Control Center at Linkinus Blog

[…] yes, it will indeed break Linkinus. It will also break TextMate, Growl and many […]

23 May 2008

by Lukhnos D. Liu

Hi, I’m the developer of OpenVanilla, a popular CJK input method toolkit. Lately we’ve been receiving reports of OV failing to work. And guess what? All of them have installed LCC, and the disaster followed.

I’ve written to one of Growl’s developers, and he replied that OV is also among the breakage list (Growl, TextMate, CrossOver games).

I hope that someone at Logitech can have at least some slight awareness that they’re breaking other people’s program, badly. Although we’ll come up with our own respective workarounds, but technically every app should be able to use its own default NSConnection–not being forced to create its own, which is exactly what LCC is doing to the apps. This is just bad, bad behavior.

23 May 2008

by cahier lukhnos, a blog » Logitech Control Center太糟糕

[…] Growl (另有FAQ ), TextMate, AquaTerm, CrossOver games […]

09 June 2008

by Ben Cox

To uninstall LCC 2.4 got to Apps/Utilities and there is an unistaller there.

It seems to be causing trouble with Marketcircle’s Billings as well.

19 June 2008

by paul

The latest Logitech drivers (version 2.6) seems to have corrected the conflicts with TextMate.

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/398/&cl=us,en?prodcrid=398

26 September 2008

by Billigflug

:) Yes, it´s so simple. I uninstalled it too. But consider that some people just don´t want to miss one of those features and are keen to solve the problems in order to have that system they want to have:) As far as I am concerned I am just as pragmatic like you.

05 November 2008

by Immobilien kredit

I installed the actual Driver but nothing happens …

05 November 2008

by Tao Effect Blog » Blog Archive » Logitech Control Center

[…] window, and in both cases we tracked the problem down to Logitech’s Control Center (LCC), which is notorious in its reputation for breaking various […]

17 February 2009

by jd

i used appcleaner to try to rid my computer of lcc, it was removed from my system preferences pane and i cant seem to find of trace of it anywhere, yet everytime i unplug or connect my mouse i get a logitech controller message appearing telling me that it was unplugged or connected.

really want to remove this software. only installed it in blind hope to get my two month old logitech nano mouse to work again ( it stopped working yesterday :-(

thx

17 February 2009

by jd

to answer my own question i found an logitech uninstaller in my applications/utility folder that worked to completely remove it.

06 June 2009

by Ben

The s530 Logitech Laser Mac mouse finally has decent drivers, but the mouse has always tracked just TERRIBLY, wiggly, jumpy and even backwards.

Just a head’s up. This seems to be the most intelligent discussion of the product.

The sibling keyboard is beautiful.

Still, Kensington for the win. Especially for their outstanding Mac support.

15 October 2009

by Eric

Any updates on LCC compatibility with Mac OS X? They claim to have a Snow Leopard compatible version 3.1, from 09/22/09. I’m hesitant to install it given the comments above, but wondering if anyone else has experience with it.