karabiner_grabber stealing internal keyboard from kanata

[benceferdinandy-signifyd]

I'm running kanata on MacOS and I've had issues with karabiner_grabber taking hold of the internal keyboard and kanata failing. The combination of this somehow leads to me not being able to type at all. The solution (from Claude) is to remove the grabber plist

❯ sudo launchctl bootout system/org.pqrs.service.daemon.karabiner_grabber 2>/dev/null || true
sudo launchctl disable system/org.pqrs.service.daemon.karabiner_grabber

but this always get reinstalled if Karabiner has an update (I use brew for updating karabiner and kanata as well).

Does anybody have a good solution for this? It's pretty irritating and making my kanata startup service first kill the grabber every time feels like a hack, but it might be what I opt for.

[zachpoblete]

Did you install the full Karabiner Elements or just the Karabiner driver? If you did install the full Karabiner Elements, do you need the full program or do you just need it so that you can run Kanata?

[benceferdinandy-signifyd]

I used brew and it only has karabiner-elements as far as I can tell. I did a quick search now, so it seems I should be able to manually install this? Probably not overly terrible to subscribe to new releases and do it manually. Is there a better way though?

[zachpoblete]

Maybe you installed the full Karabiner Elements because of this comment.

In any case, the supported Karabiner driver version is v6.2.0 (not the latest):

Kanata's bundled karabiner-driverkit crate is built against that release's IPC, and pqrs ships protocol changes between minor versions, so newer driver releases are not guaranteed to work.

This is from Kanata's macOS setup guide (created less than a month ago!). You may want to read it.

If Karabiner Elements is installed, you may need to disable its background processes: Open System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions. In the App Background Activity section, disable the following if you see them:

• Karabiner-Elements Privileged Daemons
• Karabiner-Elements Privileged Daemons v2

I have my own macOS setup guide that attempts to be even more straightforward. Though, please note I'm not a macOS user 😅

[benceferdinandy-signifyd]

Ah, awesome, I definitely set this up before that guide. And honestly, I would not be a MacOS user if the choice was mine either :D But here we are ... I'm going to do a cleanup this week, hopefully everything will be more stable. I should probably also try the pre-release, but hopefully that will land soon anyway.

[ferdinandyb]

ok, so this (and possible updating to latest built-from-source) has solved all my macos worries