The KM Editor Won't Open on macOS El Capitan

Questions & Suggestions
1

For the past few days (perhaps since upgrading to El Capitan 10.11.6?), the Keybard Maestro editor won't open on my Macbook Pro (Late 2011).

When I try (either from the Applications folder, the Dock, or the KM engine mac menu-bar menu, nothing happens.

Thinking it might help to restart the KM engine, I quit it from the drop-down menu. But no change.

Any idea what I can try?

Thanks!

2

What version of KM are you using? If you can’t tell, then what OS/X version did you update from?

The reason I ask is that Yosemite/El Capitan require KM version 7.

3

Thanks for the reply!

I’m using KM 7.2.1. I believe that I upgraded my Mac from the most recent previous version of El Capitan. I know that Keyboard Maestro was working fine under El Capitan until recently.

Doug

4

Huh. Have you tried reinstalling KM?

5

This may be obvious, but have you tried restarting your Mac?

6

Sound of palm hitting forehead: Duh!

When I tried to restart, I discovered that KM was running and prevented reboot. Several tries to force quit failed. Finally, I had to force restart by holding down the on key.

Upon restart, all is well!

Thanks for bearing with me through my duh-ness!

7

LOL. We've all been there. No worries.

8

No problem. But write this down:

Restart is the first line of recovery in response to strange new problems.

2 Likes
9

I’ll have it tattooed on my palm, so I see it when I’m about to slap my forehead!

Doug

2 Likes
10

Hey Doug,

How did you go about force-quitting?

Did you use the force-quit dialog or the Activity Monitor?

The next step is to gird your loins and use the Terminal:

If you’re unfamiliar with the Terminal it’s a bit scary when you first do this, but if it works it’s better than a forced-shutdown. (Only very rarely have I seen a kill command fail on OSX.)

Searching for the process:

ps auxc | egrep -i "key"

Result:

myUserName   212   0.2  1.1  2615472  88512   ??  S     6:17AM   0:19.89 Keyboard Maestro Engine
myUserName   272   0.0  0.0  2471156   3956   ??  S     6:17AM   0:00.03 CloudKeychainProxy
myUserName   247   0.0  0.2  2534616  17624   ??  S     6:17AM   0:00.12 Keychain Circle Notification
myUserName  1243   0.0  1.1  3789456  89764   ??  S     8:12AM   0:05.09 Keyboard Maestro

That gives me the process names and ID numbers.

From there:

killall lets you use the process name.

NOTE – quotes are needed due to spaces in the process name.

killall 'Keyboard Maestro Engine'

kill uses the PID (Process ID) of the process:

kill -9 212

-9 is the baddest of the kill codes:

9  KILL (non-catchable, non-ignorable kill)

See “man kill” and “man killall” in the Terminal for the man (manual) pages.

The StackOverflow article has some fairly comprehensive information.

-Chris

1 Like
11

Thanks so much! This is very helpful.

When I needed to force quit KM, I tried Activity Monitor a couple times. No luck. I also tried the command key combination, just in case.

I use Terminal for SSL, so I’m not shy to use it. But I often neglect to think of it for Mac problems.

Your suggestion and instructions are very helpful.

I’ll keep them in Evernote, so I can access them the next time I need them!

Doug