reset Karabiner after sleep without a reboot

I tap caps lock for esc and hold it for ctrl, my most-used Karabiner remap. After the Mac woke from sleep one day, it stopped: caps lock went dead, and so did every other Karabiner remap.

For a long time a reboot was the only thing that brought it back. Restarting the Karabiner app did nothing. Its “Restart Karabiner” menu item runs a documented one-liner:

$ launchctl kickstart -k \    gui/$(id -u)/org.pqrs.service.agent.karabiner_console_user_server

That only kickstarts the per-user agent, and after a wake the agent is fine. The part that hangs is the root daemons. The agent restart never touches them.

Turns out since Karabiner 15.0 those daemons register through Apple’s SMAppService and run under launchd as root. So I can cycle them the same way, in the system/ domain instead of gui/. That, plus reactivating the DriverKit extension, brings the remaps back with no reboot.

the commands

# re-activate the driverkit extension (no-op when already active)sudo '/Applications/.Karabiner-VirtualHIDDevice-Manager.app/Contents/MacOS/Karabiner-VirtualHIDDevice-Manager' activate# cycle the two root daemons (this clears the stuck state)sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/org.pqrs.service.daemon.Karabiner-VirtualHIDDevice-Daemonsudo launchctl kickstart -k system/org.pqrs.service.daemon.Karabiner-Core-Service# the per-user agent too, same as the app's menulaunchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/org.pqrs.service.agent.karabiner_console_user_server

launchctl kickstart -k force-restarts a running service, killing the old instance first. The system/ daemons need sudo; the gui/ agent runs in my own domain, so it does not.

the fish function

I keep it in a fish function so I don’t have to remember any of that:

function karabinerRestart    echo "Restarting Karabiner daemons (sudo password needed)…"    sudo '/Applications/.Karabiner-VirtualHIDDevice-Manager.app/Contents/MacOS/Karabiner-VirtualHIDDevice-Manager' activate    sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/org.pqrs.service.daemon.Karabiner-VirtualHIDDevice-Daemon    sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/org.pqrs.service.daemon.Karabiner-Core-Service    launchctl kickstart -k gui/(id -u)/org.pqrs.service.agent.karabiner_console_user_server    echo "Done. Try your remaps now (no reboot needed)."end

The bug is still open (#3914, #4470) on Karabiner 16.x and Apple Silicon. The #4470 thread lands on the same daemon-kickstart fix, which is how I confirmed restarting the agent was never going to be enough.