Karabiner-Elements: It all stops working after a while on Catalina

Steps to reproduce:

1. Install Catalina on your Mac (mine is MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018), with touchbar and French AZERTY keyboard)
2. Install Karabiner Elements (I upgraded to 12.9.0 during my tests campaign)
3. Keep mashing the Caps Lock key until keyboard freezes.
4. All other human input devices remain fully functional (trackpad, touchbar, fingerprint sensor). Since this is an internal keyboard, I am left with no choice but to reboot (quitting and/or restarting Karabiner has no effect). Sometimes a key is stuck in the down position and causes autorepeat typing to wherever the mouse focus goes. Clicking on that key in the OS’ Keyboard Visualizer makes no difference; neither does pressing it physically.

Other interesting facts:

• It takes anywhere from a few seconds to 5 minutes for step 3 to happen on my system.
• Mashing other keys at the same time as Caps Lock, in particular dead accent keys, appears to speed up the crash.
• It is not necessary to hit any key that is being modified by Karabiner.
• The setting of Devices → Basic configuration → Manipulate LED appears to make no difference.
• Finally, the crash doesn’t happen if I first quit Karabiner immediately after boot, no matter how long I keep mashing all the keys.

This is still happening for me on Big Sur 11.4, Karabiner-Elements v13.5.0.

Even after quitting karabiner-elements, there are a bunch of processes still active, and I can’t kill them, they keep respawning. I also can’t unload the kext, presumably because of the running processes.

Running launchctl disable system/org.pqrs.karabiner.karabiner_kextd doesn’t do anything 😕

I have been having this issue the past week or so, and it seems to be related to hitting CAPS LOCK too quickly next to other keypresses. It will halt all keyboard input until I unplug and replug the external keyboard. But then my mappings are inactive seemingly unless I reboot.

me too.

I have been having this issue the past week or so, and it seems to be related to hitting CAPS LOCK too quickly next to other keypresses. It will halt all keyboard input until I unplug and replug the external keyboard. But then my mappings are inactive seemingly unless I reboot.

It seems to have been resolved. Please add the version it was fixed since, or re-escalate if I’m wrong and it isn’t. Closing.

There is a beta version available which may solve your problem.

https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/docs/macos-big-sur/

I’ve had this issue several times since upgrading to Catalina, but with a different keyboard than mentioned by others. I’m using Logitech MXKeys. I’ve come to the conclusion that if not initially loaded last, karabiner will not work with complex modifications. To get things working, here is what I have been doing:

1. Disable any autorun or autostart settings if you have karabiner loading at startup.
2. Reboot the computer and choose not to reopen running apps.
3. Once rebooted, wait until everything has had a chance to start up and then launch karabiner.

Hopefully, these steps will help others. As soon as I do this, all my complex modifications work again.

Same issue here:

• Karabiner-Elements: 12.9.0
• MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018)
• macOS: 10.15.4

Randomly pressing the caps lock will trigger the built-in keyboard to completely stop responding (touch bar still works though). Rebooting the systems resolves the issue until I accidentally hit caps lock again. For now I have disabled my caps lock key under System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys.

type:key_down        code:24         name:u               misc:
type:key_up          code:24         name:u               misc:
type:key_down        code:8          name:e               misc:
type:key_up          code:8          name:e               misc:
type:key_down        code:40         name:return_or_enter misc:
type:key_up          code:40         name:return_or_enter misc: 
type:key_down        code:57         name:caps_lock       misc:   <-- start mashing caps lock here
type:key_up          code:57         name:caps_lock       misc:
type:key_down        code:57         name:caps_lock       misc:
type:key_up          code:57         name:caps_lock       misc:
type:key_down        code:57         name:caps_lock       misc:
< keyboard frozen now >

Let me know if any other logs are needed.

This is happening to me as well. I’m on a 13-inch MacBook Pro 2017 model.

A solution that fixed the problem when it occurs for me, without restarting was: sudo pkill -f karabiner

If you can either attach an external keyboard to type this, or use the “Emoji & Symbols” menu to enter the characters one by one (ugh).

Now it has gotten to the stage where I can’t get keyboard-off nor complex modifications to work at all, even after rebooting multiple times 😦

However! I just reinstalled karabiner 12.9.0 without restarting and everything works again… So hopefully that’s a consistent workaround