Describe the bug
After running BetterTouchTool 6.143 on macOS Tahoe (26.2), all mouse clicks and keyboard input become completely unresponsive after certain system dialogs appear, while the cursor can still be moved. The system only recovers input when BetterTouchTool is terminated. This happens at least once per day.
Affected input device (e.g. MacBook Trackpad, Magic Mouse/Trackpad, Touch Bar, etc.):
Screenshots:
Not applicable (freeze state cannot be captured easily).
Device information:
Additional information (e.g. crash logs, related issues, etc.):
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Issue occurs sporadically and cannot be reliably reproduced by specific steps; it typically appears after interacting with system dialogs (installer warnings, permission dialogs, etc.).
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Cursor motion remains functional, but mouse clicks and keyboard input are ignored by the system. When switching off the mouse, the keyboard works again. When switching the mouse back on, the keyboard works still until the first click with the mouse. Then the keyboard doesnt work at all and the mouse cursor moves but doesnt click. This can be repeated infintely.
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The only way to restore input without rebooting is to terminate BetterTouchTool; quitting BTT immediately restores full input functionality.
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Other utilities such as SteerMouse, Moom, and Keyboard Maestro have been disabled during testing and do not affect the issue.
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The problem occurs even when BetterTouchTool triggers and actions are disabled, suggesting the issue is related to the BTT background process or how it hooks input events.
unfortunately I haven't seen able to reproduce, if you can figure out any pattern please let me know
any other mouse related apps installed in that could conflict?
Please advise how to create any debug logs or so when the problem arises.
I just bought BTT, but at this moment I disabled it and it’s useless for me due to this bug.
if the issue occurred, go to help -> export diagnostic debug information, then send the result to me (andreas@folivora.ai)
Afterwards you can also go back to previous versions for now:
Do you maybe all have SteerMouse installed?
Unfortunately/Fortunately there have been no similar reports yet. Have you been able to reproduce the issue?
One known macOS bug that can cause this to happen is related to accessibility permissions. If you remove the Accessibility permissions for BTT while BTT is still running, the system would lock up completely. (This affects all similar tools and has been the case for a long time)
I cannot produce logs, but this happened to me also, several times over the period of weeks. I didn’t realize it could be caused by BTT. I am not at my computer right now so I can’t look up exact versions, but I wanted to mention this.
BTT version 6.xxx (currently the latest non-beta release) through Setapp
MacOS Sequoia up-to-date
MacBook Pro M3
Magic Mouse
Logitech MX Keys
Never installed SteerMouse. At the time I had LogicOptionsPlus installed.
I am currently experimenting with BTT beta and Logitech kb configuration and LogitechOptionsPlus uninstalled so I will report back if it occurs again
LogitechOptions can cause the issue if it is running at the same time as BTT AND you have a Logitech Configuration added in BTT. If you want to use Logitech support in BTT, Logitech Options+ needs to be uninstalled completely unfortunately.
Just to make things clear: when I experienced the problem I was still on the latest formal BTT release with LogitechOptionsPlus installed and NO Logitech keyboard configuration in BTT.
I only switched to the latest BTT beta yesterday to test with the new BTT mobile app and found the Logitech keyboard configuration and decided to switch over, aka uninstall LogitechOptions, which I did.
in that case what you saw was most likely not related to the Logitech Options app! Let's keep monitoring, if anybody can produce logs that would be very helpful as this only seems to affect very few / specific setups.
Possibly add a trackpad gesture or non-mouse/keyboard related trigger that let's you quit / restatt BTT in case it happens again
Hello, I have been having this issue for months, including on a previous macOS version. But on the previous macOS version it was easier to restore control, I could go back to the login screen, put the computer to sleep and then I would restore control, but it's not the case anymore (I think since Tahoe). So now I am using a BTT mobile script in order to restart BTT and that restores access. It happens after (some but not all) permission dialog screens. It's very annoying and it took me a long time to narrow it down to BTT because it was not frequent in the beginning and I could not reliably reproduce it (and of course since I couldn’t use the keyboard or click I couldn’t easily kill anything). Now I’d say it happens every day or two.
Is there a way to get debug logs while not having keyboard or touchpad access to BTT? Can I generate one from BTT mobile?
I have actually had this happen to me on my end quite frequently as well previously but not recently ever since I changed how I updated BTT.
Would by any chance be using Homebrew to install/upgrade BTT? I noticed that it occurs whenever I upgrade BTT via Homebrew and continue to use BTT without restarting it. I had to SSH into the Mac from another machine to kill BTT before it becomes responsive again.
