macOS Utilities for Identifying Apps Hijacking Global Keyboard Shortcuts?

Supercharge by Sindre Sorhus.

The best current option for this is Supercharge by Sindre Sorhus, a free Mac utility available from his website at sindresorhus.com/supercharge. It's recommended as a more capable and actively maintained alternative to the abandoned ShortcutDetective. If you don't want a dedicated utility, you can also diagnose this manually: Open System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts to check for conflicts in macOS-registered shortcuts Use Activity Monitor to identify background processes that might be using input monitoring Check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Input Monitoring to see all apps with global input access I hope this solves the alternative problem, I prefer the Activity Monitor, but you can choose accordingly, never used Supercharge personally though

input monitoring is not required for global shortcuts, this won’t tell you much. One thing that might work is opening Activity Monitor and pressing the problematic shortcut many times and see which processes CPU usage goes up

Thanks for explaining this 😄

Yeah ChatGPT did a great job

Some browsers require you to long press cmd+q to quit.

Some apps monitor all keyboard shortcuts and that might be the reason for SideNotes to show.

Sometimes apps don't quit immediately. Cmd+q is equivalent to asking nicely "please quit at your earliest convenience". It may have some busy child processes working in the background, and it has to get them to all to shut down cleanly before it can quit itself.

I also have this question, and also find shortcut detective inadequate.

You could try booting into safe mode to see if that solves the issue. If so, look at whatever third party stuff you normally run (safe mode disables it)

https://objective-see.org/tools.html

If CMD+Q only fails in Vivaldi, that's probably not a hijack. Vivaldi has a "warn before quitting" feature that sometimes desyncs, double-tapping clears it. Also try ioreg -l | grep -i SecureInput in Terminal, an app holding secure input can swallow shortcuts globally without showing up as a shortcut hijacker.

I use supercharge!

I’d check Raycast or Alfred first if you use them, since launchers are often the shortcut culprit. For a dedicated tool, ShortcutDetective is still the closest idea, but macOS does not make this easy, so the reliable fallback is usually disabling login items and menu bar apps one by one until the shortcut comes back