BTT seems to "hijack" Cmd key (but it turns out to be the fault of "secure input activated by: loginwindow")

Describe the bug
I am using Command + Space as my shortcut to trigger Alfred. BTT has nothing to do with this shortcut. Yet, it recently stopped working for those apps for which I have a shortcut set in BTT that involves the Cmd modifier.

Here are two examples of such App specific shortcuts:

As you can see, the shortcut should only concerns the right command key (while I use the left for triggering Alfgred). This has worked for a long time, but recently it stopped working. More specifically, what happens now when I press (left) Cmd and space is that the Alfred search bar briefly , for a fraction of a second, flashes up and then disappears again. This only happens when one of the apps with a trigger like the above is in focus. When I change their shortcut to, say, Ctrl + space, the issue disappears. So it seeems clear that BTT is somehow hijacking the left command key even though it is only supposed to listen to the right one.

As a workaround, I added a global BTT shortcut for (left) cmd + space which triggers cmd + space being sent to Alfred (if I have it trigger cmd + space globally, I get an infinite loop). But since my setup has worked for years without such a workaround, I assume the issue can be fixed by reversing some recent code change.


Affected input device (e.g. MacBook Trackpad, Magic Mouse/Trackpad, Touch Bar, etc.):
MacBook Pro Keyboard


Device information:

  • Type of Mac: Macbook Pro M1
  • macOS version: 14.6.1
  • BetterTouchTool version: 4.463 (46431)

Additional information (e.g. crash logs, related issues, etc.):
This has been going on for some days now, across various restarts. But I just noticed this:
CleanShot 2024-09-02 at 11.05.15

So I will do a restart to make sure that this login window glitch is not the cause of the problem.

Edit: Turns out it was indeed the "loginwindow" that caused the issue, but it wasn't the the login window to login to my Mac but some tab that was open in Safari. When I closed Safari, the issue went away.

I fail to grasp how a tab in Safari can prevent BTT from properly handling keyboard shortcuts, but I'm glad othe issue is solved. Well, I do understand that the safari tab somehow activates "secure input" and that this implies "limited functionality" in BTT, but I don't understand what kind of limitation this might be, given that the shortcuts still work with the above mentioned workaround. - Anyway, I'll but this as a question here in case anyone feels they would like to share their knowledge around this. But the "bug" is resolved.

If secure input is active, BTT can not differentiate between left and right modifier keys. In that case the shortcuts you defined will work with both left and right modifiers. Because of this they might block existing shortcuts.

If it says secure input was activated by loginwindow, this is usually not true. Most of the time some app activated secure input (e.g. in a password field) and forgot to deactivate it. There are usually two ways to solve this: quit all apps one by one to find the culprit or logout of macOS and back in.

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