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ogonocaius Author

Level 1

8 points

imac keyboard input stop only within an app

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)

High Sierra 10.13.6

Starting a few days ago, I will be typing in some program (Notes; MS Word; Excel; MATLAB; Chrome; etc) and suddenly, mid-word, input stops. I can go to another app and it's working again. Restarting the app fixes the problem; or, with Chrome, I can create a new *window* (not tab) and it will be ok again.

It seems like it's happened for every app I type in (listed above), at least once.

It's continued since a system restart.

Could there be some other program that is interfering? Java crashing or something?

The problem is not the keyboard, I have tried others (bluetooth and USB) and all behave the same way. It is specific to apps. The keyboards work fine.

This imac is old, so old OS can't be updated anymore. But this problem is new.

Any ideas?

thanks

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jul 18, 2022 12:49 PM

Similar questions

4 replies

Old Toad

Level 10

208,181 points

Jul 20, 2022 10:38 AM in response to ogonocaius

Log into a new, basic, admin user account, Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac, and see if the problem persists. This tells us if the problem is limited to your user account or is system wide.

If the problem doesn't exist in the other user account and you're still unable to boot into Safe Mode from your account try the following; Boot into the Recovery volume (boot with the Command + R keys held down - Intel Macs) or (How to Boot an M1 Mac into Recovery Mode), select Disk Utiity and run First Aid on all available boot volumes. Then reboot normally and test.

ogonocaius Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 18, 2022 1:38 PM in response to ogonocaius

Additional info:

Interesting behavior with Matlab: I can select a figure (a separate window from the main window with the editor and command line) and type on the keyboard, and - as it should - it goes to the command line and begins typing. But right away input is dead again - if I type very quickly I can get 3 characters out, it's like there's a time rather than a character limit. wtf is going on?

Other programs don't have this separable window structure so I can't do similar tests there...

ogonocaius Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 20, 2022 9:18 AM in response to rkaufmann87

Hi, I wasn't even able to start in safe mode - loading progress meter just stuck forever. Someone suggested could be a hard drive issue, HD was ~80% full. I spent a day deleting ~500GB of stuff, haven't tried safe mode again but have not had the typing problem again in 2 days.. so..

rkaufmann87

Level 10

141,276 points

Jul 18, 2022 2:19 PM in response to ogonocaius

Please restart in Safe Mode and retest.

imac keyboard input stop only within an app