how do i turn off my keyboard on my macbook pro?

there will be a series of high pitched clicks from your speakers when it happens.

To HELP, or not To HELP? That's the question!

Having to explain WHY I'm asking a question, seems like an impediment (I'n my humble opinion). I know I could be wrong! Obviously there are exceptions. So please forgive me if I'm way off.

dominic23>"There is no preference setting to turn off keyboard"

dominic23>"Third party applications and terminal method will produce unexpected problems."

[You are obviously knowledgable and trying to help. Great info, thanks!]

dominic23>"Keyboard plays a very important part in troubleshooting."

[Do you think? If they don't know this already, they probably have no clue what troubleshooting is anyway. If you don't understand how important your keyboard is, then maybe you need to learn, by troubleshooting the full extent of their own id10t error capability. Am I wrong?]

Most of the posts I go to for help are riddled with questions like "why would you want to do that?" This always irritates me personally. I'm kind-of venting at all the posts I've ever read. So, no hard feelings, nothing personal.

Regards,

Sr Developer

Thank you! This with disabling my mouse allowed me to get back control of Macbook after spilling coffee ;-) It's pretty annoying when the 'screen lightness down' button is pressed constantly 😀

Sorry, I hadn't seen this before. When I came back just now, it told me I had a draft to recover, and this draft contained that code, but without the spaces. I don't know how they got there. I hope they didn't give you trouble.

My laptop was running Mavericks at the time I posted this. I'm glad you found something that worked for Yosemite.

I tried this in Mountain Lion 10.8.5 on a Macbook Pro but it's not working.

Fyi, 2 reasons I'm aware of: 1) You want to clean your keyboard without having to shut down first. This obviously requires putting pressure on the keys. 2) You have a pet (i.e. cat) and don't want 25+ different actions being triggered b/c they walked on or sat on the keyboard. 🙂

KeyboardCleanTool is a free app you can download from: https://www.boastr.net/downloads/

It disables the keyboard with 1 click, and reenables it with 1 click. It does not work for disabling your MacBookPro keyboard so that you can use a Bluetooth keyboard instead (both the built-in keyboard and the BlueTooth keyboard get disabled simultaneously).

I want to be able to disable my broken keys laptop keyboard so that I can sit my Bluetooth keyboard on top of it without accidentally pressing buttons, but this won't help me. I tried F1, F6, and F7 to no success. I'd rather not type commands into the Terminal. So far, I haven't found an answer for my situation.

Yay, I found an app that works!

Karabiner is a free app that allows you to disable your Mac's keyboard when an external keyboard is connected: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/

It can also do a ton of other things to customize your keyboard, which I have not explored.

A big thank you to this "Cat-proofing a MacBook keyboard" article: http://www.mackungfu.org/cat-proofing-a-macbook-keyboard

This is actually quite easy, I can't believe I had to google so much to find the answer and almost paid 10 bucks for a program to do it!! http://www.mackungfu.org/cat-proofing-a-macbook-keyboard

1.

Open System Preferences, then click the Accessibility icon.

2.

Click the Mouse & Trackpad icon in the list at the left.

3.

At the top right, click the Options button alongside the Enable Mouse Keys checkbox.

4.

Put a check in Ignore Built-In Trackpad When Mouse Keys is On, and click OK.

5.

Close System Preferences, then in future when the MacBook keyboard is sat upon by a cat, tap Option (Alt) five times.

I am so glad that I am not the only one who "wants to clean the keyboard without turning it off" since Apple strongly recommend not to turn it off unless one is not gonna use it for a few days.

Unfortunately Ctrl - F1 doesn't disable keyboard input in OS High Sierra. Instead, Ctrl - F1 enables/disables some keyboard accessibility preferences: http://ca.mag.cm/0Q1K3S27360r 😢