Finding the App That Is Stealing Your Shortcut

How macOS allocates hotkeys

There is no arbitration. When an application registers a global hotkey, it either gets it or it does not, and if it does not it typically receives no useful error. Registration order is determined by launch order, which is why a conflict can appear to come and go between reboots — a race that resolves differently each morning.

Separately, the frontmost application sees keystrokes before global hotkeys in some cases. That produces the specific pattern where a shortcut works everywhere except in one application, which is a different problem from a global conflict and has a different fix.

The elimination method

Open the log window — hold ⌥ Option with the menu open, choose View Logging… — and keep it visible. A shortcut that produces no log line never arrived. A shortcut that produces a line but no movement is a different fault entirely and belongs in the greyed-out menu guide.

1. Confirm the failing combination produces no log entry.
2. Press it with Finder frontmost. If it now works, the previous frontmost app was capturing it — rebind inside that app.
3. If it fails everywhere, quit one background utility, then test again. Repeat.
4. The moment a log line appears, the last thing you quit is the culprit.
5. If you exhaust every third-party app, test in a fresh macOS user account to rule out something in your login session.

Work through candidates in likelihood order rather than alphabetically:

The one-app case

When a shortcut works everywhere except inside one application, that application has claimed the key for itself. Terminal emulators, terminal-based editors, IDEs and remote desktop clients are the usual offenders — a terminal running a multiplexer may be consuming several Control-Option combinations for pane navigation.

There is no way to make both work. Choose which side to change. Rebinding inside the application is usually preferable, because it affects one context rather than your muscle memory everywhere. Remote desktop clients often have a setting for whether keystrokes are sent to the remote machine or handled locally, which is the cleanest fix of all.

Choosing a scheme that does not collide

The default scheme uses Control-Option because that space is comparatively empty across macOS. If you must move away from it, these principles keep the result usable:

• Avoid Command-only combinations. Command belongs to applications and you will collide constantly.
• Adding Shift is cheap. Control-Option-Shift is almost entirely unclaimed.
• Keep directional meaning intact. Arrows for direction, letters for fractions. A scheme with no internal logic will not be remembered.
• Change as little as possible. Rebinding everything on day one produces a scheme you cannot recall by day three.
• Write down what you changed. Or better, export the configuration to JSON so the answer is recoverable.

There is also an alternate default set based on Magnet's bindings, which is useful if you are migrating and already have that muscle memory:

# switch to the Magnet-style default set, then restart the app
defaults write com.knollsoft.Rectangle alternateDefaultShortcuts -bool true

# back to the Spectacle-style set
defaults write com.knollsoft.Rectangle alternateDefaultShortcuts -bool false

Shortcuts still captured after uninstalling

A well-documented and genuinely confusing case: the app is removed, but the combinations still do nothing in other applications — they appear to be swallowed by something that is no longer installed.

This is usually a stale preference file, a login item still launching a copy, or a leftover privacy grant. The complete removal sequence is covered in the uninstall guide; the short version is that deleting the application bundle alone is not sufficient.

Questions