Background

Apps with global hotkeys like Keysmith, Keyboard Maestro, Better Touch Tool, TextExpander, etc. work by watching all keystrokes you make on your Mac. These apps ignore most of these keystrokes, but if you type some combination of keys that the app recognizes (like a global hotkey you've set up to activate a macro) it can "consume" that keystroke and take an action.

When an app consumes a keystroke then no other apps will see that you typed it. This is useful because if you type a keystroke to activate a macro, then you probably don't want that keystroke to also activate some other action in whatever app you have open.

What is SecureInput?

SecureInput is a security feature built in to macOS that allows one app to temporarily consume all keystrokes, and therefore prevent any other app from seeing those keystrokes. This is useful when a user is typing in sensitive information like a password. In fact, any time your keyboard focus is in a password field in any app, SecureInput is activated by default.

SecureInput consumes all keystrokes, so any time SecureInput is active all global hotkeys in all apps will stop working. They simply can't see that you're typing anything!

Normally this isn't a problem since SecureInput is supposed to be deactivated as soon as the user is done typing sensitive information. But oftentimes apps contain bugs that prevent them from disabling SecureInput when they're done, which permanently cripples any app that supports global hotkeys.

How do you fix the problem?

In short, to fix the problem, you need to identify which app has enabled SecureInput and restart that app.

Unfortunately, there's no surefire way to identify which app it is, but once you discover which app it is then it will probably be that same app causing problems in the future should this happen again (e.g., it's almost always 1Password for me).

To identify the app you need to sytematically restart each app you're running. That is, restart an app then see if Keysmith works. If it does, great - you've identified the app. If not, repeat with another app.

Sometimes it's macOS itself that is the problem, and simply putting your computer to sleep and waking it back up again will fix the issue.

If you're comfortable in a terminal, then there is a more straightforward way to find the culprit as described in this post.