The longer BTT has been running, the slower that ⌥→ and ⌥← get when moving the caret through text

Bugs or Unexpected Behavior
1

Hey,

so basically it's exactly as the subject states. As the minutes go by that BTT has been running, I noticed that holding option-right arrow or option-left arrow gets slower and slower and slower. If I quit BTT, it instantly goes back to full speed, which I have set to almost a blur it's so fast.

This is a real pain for me and after finishing this bug report, I'm gonna write a little script to restart BTT at opportune times e.g. when I'm AFK.

Affected input device : Macbook Pro M1 16" keyboard

Screenshots : Perfect! It happened as I was writing this draft even! Which is about 15 mins since I started BTT :grimacing:

When BTT has been up 15 mins:

Immediately after restarting BTT:

Device information:

  • Type of Mac: Macbook Pro M1 16"
  • macOS version: Tahoe 26.6.2 (25G83)
  • BetterTouchTool version: 6.826 (NOTE I can confirm that it also happens in 6.831 - I downgraded to see if it was new in 6.831)

Additional information (e.g. crash logs, related issues, etc.): before anyone asks, no, I do not have any keyboard bindings to option-right arrow or option-left arrow :slight_smile:

Thanks folks :saluting_face:

2 
<BUMP>

apologies, just trying to get some eyes-on with this, Does anyone have any ideas? It's really bad :frowning:

Cheers,

Pete

3

(un)fortunately I have never heard of or experienced such an issue. It could be a event processing problem, especially if you have multiple apps listening to event input conflicts with other apps can occur.

I'd try two things:

  1. get the installed system event taps at the time this occurs via the BTT settings

image
image1920×1339 211 KB

  1. get a sample of the BTT process to see whether something is keeping it busy using this terminal command:
sample BetterTouchTool > ~/Desktop/btt.txt
4

:saluting_face: Roger that Andreas, I will attempt to gather that data shortly. Thanks for the prompt response as always.

FWIW I do have Karabiner Elements installed which is the only thing I can think of that's messing around at such a low level but it's generally really, really well implemented and ofc we know restarting BTT resolves it. Anyway, let's see what the data say.

Best,

Peter

5

unfortunately this is often the case with such conflicts, restarting will resolve such issues but doesn’t really tell about what is causing it.

There have been conflicts with Karabiner in the past, but I haven’t heard of any recent.

6

Hi Andreas, I followed your instructions and got the process sample and the list of event taps. Please see attached.

As before, once I'd gathered the sample, quitting BTT sped up ⌥→ and ⌥← by several times. Any pointers are much appreciated.

Best,

Peter

BetterTouchTool_2026-10-02_101434_eiGv.sample.txt (10.3 MB)

event-taps.txt (5.5 KB)

7

Your sample strongly points at the BTT Cheat Sheet causing this! I'll have a look & try to fix it, possibly some event cleanup is not working correctly anymore.

8

I think this should be resolved in 6.886 alpha!

9

You are kidding me! :rofl:

That I would not have guessed in a million years :rofl: Nice job spotting it and fixing it!

Cheers,

Pete

10

me neither :joy: glad you reported it!