After sleep, global touchbar widgets are not visible

Restarting BTT via the menubar menu has been my go-to way of restoring the touchbar's global buttons. Works everytime.

Your issue seems only slightly related. Do you have Magic Trackpad mirroring enabled in the advanced BTT preferences? Otherwise BTT can not cause the cursor to be inverted - it would need deeper system access for that, maybe some other app you have installed?

In general I currently can only recommend to update to 2.652 alpha, but unfortunately sometimes macOS still seems to decide not to show the BTT Touch Bar. On affected systems I recommend to define a keyboard shortcut and assign the "Toggle BetterTouchTool Touch Bar" predefined action for now.

Today I've changed 2 checkboxes in BTT settings: I've enabled "Show BetterTouchTool Icon on the left side" and disabled "Hide BetterTouchTool Touch Bar if nothing to show" and there were no issues today. Maybe those changes helped somehow, or it's just a coincidence...

+1 to this solution. I was having the same problem - when I woke my MBP up from sleep, BTT was still running but the touchbar was back to the mac default buttons. I had to quit BTT and then run it again to get it back. This solution worked for me!

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Maybe it was just a coincidence with the mouse but it did happen on the first time I rebooted after installing BTT so I dunno. Nothing else was configured that day. And no the Magic Trackpad mirroring isn't enabled. I'm happy to say that for now it does seem like BTT is working again. After I re-entered all the things like defaukt=spotify, date, and box dimensions, it hasn't recurred in the alpha. It just lost those settings once.

same here but i have to do it after a long sleep every single day

I've tried it couple weeks ago, no luck :frowning:

Ok, never mind, today I've got the same issue :\

Sometimes touch bar also disappear not because of going to sleep.

Just a minute ago, I opened Spotify, and touch bar reset to it's original mac OS x touch bar.

@Andreas_Hegenberg -> just now, for the first time since long time ago, BTT did not take control over touchbar after sleep. I've noticed one thing that was different then all others - my battery level was very low this time (around 5%). Perhaps battery level might be another factor that causes this issue?

I have this problem too. I have to restart BTT every time I close and open my MacBook Pro 2017. Other BTT functions work, just not the Touch Bar. Considering I use the BTT Touch Bar as a replacement for most native controls, this is extremely frustrating.

I'm currently working on a solution that does a visual check (by screenshotting the Touch Bar after sleep) because there is no other way for BTT to determine whether its Touch Bar is showing. This should solve the issue and will be available sometime next week.

The problem seems to be that sometimes macOS decides to not allow the BTT overlay, however BTT can not notice this with the current APIs - so it believes it is correctly showing the Touch Bar when it actually isn't. By screenshotting the Touch Bar, BTT can check whether it is showing the correct one.

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I have this exact problem since I've upgraded my MacBook Pro to Mojave. BTT 2.651 does restart after a short sleep but not after a sleep of several hours. When this happens, BTT does run in the background but the Touch Bar configured in BTT is not displayed AND BTT triggers which are supposed to run on wake are not launched either. The latest suggested fix might address the reported Touch Bar bug but this issue seems to impact more features than the Touch Bar like triggers.

Before I resort to the screenshot solution I'd like to ask you to test v2.653 alpha.

I have finally found a way to reproduce the issue on one of my machines (however also only by letting it sleep for multiple hours - and only while on batter power - which makes it hard to debug). And I think macOS Mojave just forgets to notify apps that the machine has woken from sleep. If this turns out to be true I'll report it to Apple as this would definitely be a bug.

In v2.653 alpha I have added a workaround:
macOS seems to always notify BTT when the machine is going to sleep. BTT now sets a flag when that happens. When the Mac wakes up again, BTT will check that flag after switching apps for the first time (which is usually when switching from the login screen app to any the last active app).
In case the sleep flag was set, BTT will then try to restart.

I have also added very detailed logs about the wake up process, this should definitely help figure out what is really going on.

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Updated to 2.653 alpha about an hour after your post. This was an update, NOT a clean install. Closed my MBP around 9AM and didn't open it again for about 4.5 hours. Had to toggle BTT via key shortcut to restore the TouchBar. It didn't solve the problem.

For the record, no USB items are/were connected and it was/is running on battery.

EDIT to add:
I had an idea, but haven't tested... I too seem to only notice after sleep for longer number of hours. I have been closing the lid each time to try to have a consistent test. I wonder if there is a correlation to the Touch Bar being visible before closing? I happen to have the keyboard backlight (which also affects the Touch Bar) set to turn off after 5 sec of inactivity. Anyone have theirs set to stay on ALL the time and having this problem? I just unchecked the box and will report back my findings.

I'm not sure if it's also related, but when using Spotify (it could be random but seems like especially when Spotify is open), touch bar also may stop working and goes back to default Mac OS's touch bar while using my laptop.

This is not during / after sleep.

And makes no difference whether if I'm on power or battery.

I have also noticed this behaviour around Spotify and its interaction with Now Playing.

I happen to have this feature turned on too (backlight switching off after 5s) - this might be interesting thing to check :slight_smile: Anyway, just bumped to 2.653 from 2.649 (though 2.649 has been working for me most of the times). We'll see how this clever workaround will work!

It would be great if you could send me the latest logs after using v2.653 for a while. (andreas@folivora.ai)

The logs are located in ~/Library/Application Support/BetterTouchTool/Logs (go there via Finder -> Go to Folder)

Spotify is a different issue, I'll check whether that can be fixed - the spotify now playing bar has the same priority as BTT.

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AHHHHH I just noticed I forgot a ! in the workaround added in v2.653 - which rendered it useless.
Sorry! In 2.654 the workaround seems to work correctly.