Cannot type in spotlight since upgrade to 10.12.1

Same issue here on a 2016 MBP. Happens intermittently and is resolved with a

killall Spotlight

I ran into this problem today on 10.12.2 on one of the new Macbook Pros w/touchbar. I did click and typed around but more randomly than as specific as described in another response and didn't get anywhere. After a reboot everything was fine again, though.

This is crazy. I thought it was a hoax reply, but for whatever reason it worked nicely.

This is the only fix so far I've seen, that doesn't require to reboot.

macOS is becoming really bad these days.

Thanks ishil!

Hit on the same issue today, @ishil workaround worked like a charm.

p.s. I am curious how did you figure out this solution.

I am wondering if this is the hardware issue as this never happened to my old (2012 Retina 15) MacBook Pro.

Can anyone confirm this?

Thanks

Thanks for this!

I found just hitting delete twice in my spotlight dialog worked quite well too.

I have had this happen several times since I use spotlight over the dock, but this is the first time I was able to resolve it, and know what I did.

Any idea what causes this?

So I had this problem as well and I was going to try the steps listed above. Then I suddenly did something and the problem was fixed. Click normally on your desktop once, click on the spotlight icon in your tray, hit backspace/delete, click on the spotlight icon again, hit backspace twice more. See if you can type into spotlight now.

No idea why that worked, but it did. Nicely done.

Same here, tapping delete/backspace once allowed me to type again in Spotlight. Well done! Weird bug...

I figured out why this bug happens on my system and maybe yours as well.

The issue occurs when you have spotlight open, and as you type, another app takes focus on top of it (Little Snitch in my case). Very easy to replicate.

Ok, that's crazy pants, why does it work??? Fixed my problem exactly as you said. I've been using a Mac since 1984 and do a weekly tech podcast and I've never seen anything so goofy.

Let me guess, you were a childhood gamer and learned cheat codes so this kind of thing seemed perfectly normal to you?

Thanks for posting!

Actually, I was a tinkerer, but I guess it's the same kind of personality haha.

Thank you so much for this fix. My lack of tech savvy made this no less impressive.

hilarious fix, but it worked! thanks