Karabiner permanently damaged my OS

[egorvinogradov]

A week ago I remapped Right Alt to act as left arrow using Karabiner.

After a couple days it broke: once I press Right Alt (which works as left arrow) and also Space, Backspace, Tab, down arrow, CapsLock and a number of other keys, it would start moving the cursor all the way to the left like I press and keep holding the right alt.

So I uninstalled Kababiner usign Unistall button. The problem stayed. I rebooted. The problem stayed.I installed/uninstall Karabiner again. The same problem. I installed Karabiner and removed it with the tool called AppCleaner. The same problem. After I uninstalled Karabiner,the Right Alt also still acted as left arrow even though the app was removed. Next day it just fixed itself. But after I put laptop to sleep, it started again! And it keeps breaking and fixing itself again and again.

My computer is damaged. It's impossible to do anything! Today it got worse again. Typing this message took me 30 minutes because the cursor keeps moving left sporadically. I can't type, can't navigate in Finder, can't switch apps using Cmd+Tab because it immediately gets stuck like the left key is always pressed. In fact, it gets stuck even before the OS is loaded -- on the password screen. The problem comes from Karabiner since the Right Alt still works as left arrow even after I uninstalled it multiple times.

@tekezo It's a disaster! It's the worst malware I've ever had. What did Karabiner change in the OS? How do I get rid of it?

[tekezo]

Karabiner does not change any system after uninstall from uninstaller. https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/document.html.en#uninstall

Do not use AppCleaner or another tools to uninstall. Install Karabiner again and uninstall from uninstaller.

[egorvinogradov]

@tekezo

That's a great advice but if you read it carefully you would've noticed that I mentioned that I installed/uninstalled it multiple times. It's been more than a week I've struggled with this problem so, of course, the Uninstall button was something that I've tried. Today, I just installed/uninstalled it again.Besides that I also manually checked all files being removed by uninstall.sh. /Library/Application Support/org.pqrs/Karabiner was NOT removed after proper uninstallation (not before but after uninstallation). So I removed it myself. But the problem is still there. And the right Alt still acts like left arrow. Also the problem persists even if I reboot in the safe mode after deinstallation. When I reinstalled Karabiner today, before uninstalling it I checked Karabiner Event Viewer. It shows that every time I pressed Space, Backspace, Tab, down arrow, CapsLock and a number of other keys, it also pressed the left arrow and kept holding it. I had to buy an external keyboard. The external keyboard works fine. So now I have to get used to it (which is a huge blow to productivity) and carry it around (which is a huge inconvenience).

So my question again -- what did Karabiner change in my OS? Hope this time you don't give me such ingenious suggestions as "use Uninstall tool" but give something that could actually be useful. Thanks.

[nkgm]

@egorvinogradov are you absolutely sure this was caused by Karabiner - ie did you not experiment with any other system utilities in the meantime? Also, can you please post your setup ie Mac model, macOS version?

To help us provide further feedback, it would help if you could post the output of EventViewer (assuming Karabiner installed):

1. Launch EventViewer
2. Click "clear the result"
3. Hit a problematic key
4. Click "copy to pasteboard" and paste results here

Repeat this procedure for a few problematic keys and paste the results here.

[tekezo]

@egorvinogradov Karabiner does not change any OS X configuration.

I guess another tools changes your keyboard. (ControllerMate, BetterTouchTool, etc)

If Karabiner still present, there are some output by the following command in Terminal. Please check it.

$ kextstat | grep pqrs