It’s been 5 days since Mojave came out and I’ve run across the oddest bug. Yesterday a few times I noticed the caps lock warning icon when I went to enter a password. I looked at my keyboard and the green light wasn’t on, but I tapped the caps lock key a few times till the indicator disappeared, entered my password, and went on with my day.
This morning, every single thing I typed was in all caps. I unjustly accused the MacBook Pro keyboard that everyone likes to mock. I’ve had stuck keys before but usually it’s intermittent, and a bit of banging on the key would usually fix it. With the caps lock key though, I could see the little light on it going on and off correctly even though typing was still in all caps. Just in case, I used some compressed air on the key, but no joy was to be had.
At the time this occurred, I was logged into a second account, so I used Fast User Switching with Touch ID (which is glorious by the way) and flipped into the main account to test the keyboard. Same caps lock problem there.
I wondered if it could possibly be a software problem. It seemed highly unlikely but I had nothing to lose. After quitting all of my applications I was just about to reboot when I realized that if the reboot didn’t fix the problem, I wouldn’t be able to log into my Mac because I wouldn’t be able to properly capitalize the password. I thought, “Hey, I know, I’ll just change my password before I log out.” Well, of course, that won’t work – you have to be able to type it to change it. I started pondering looking up that hack where you can boot into recovery mode and change the password.
Then Steve had a good idea; he wondered if I could use an external keyboard. Sure enough, the external keyboard did not have the caps lock problem. This was a relief by itself because it meant if it was a hardware problem I wouldn’t have to go to the Table of Sadness and lose my MacBook Pro on show production day!
It also did not miss my attention that the very week I did a nuke and pave I would probably have to reinstall everything after a hardware repair like that!
With a working external keyboard, I took a deep breath and rebooted. And surprisingly enough, that fixed the problem.
Is that a weird bug or what?
Are you using Karabiner-Elements?
If you use it it may be the cause
Interesting question. When it happened, I did a search to see if others were reporting it and I found people with Karabiner-Elements talking about caps lock. However, I’d never heard of that keyboard utility before so that wasn’t it. Thanks for the idea though.
I have the same problem I do not know what a Karabiner-Element is.
Did a reboot make the problem go away for you? I haven’t seen it again since that one day.
When changing keyboards, a reboot is recommended and worked for me.
I have the same problem. I have to press the Caps Lock 3 times for things to go well. It only seem to happen when type my password to logon to the laptop. Only since Mojave too. Weird.
Same thing here. i have changed my MBP with a NEW one, and the problem is the same. It’s deffinetly from the OS. If you are in Diagnose menu (at boot), the Caps lock it’s super responsive, but when you boot the OS, there are a lot of times when you must press twice or more on the CL button to activate or deasctivated it. Crappy Apple….