Hi, loving keyboard Maestro as always. Over the past week or so, every time I go to use my shortcuts, I find that the KM engine has crashed or quit overnight, and I have to load the Keyboard Maestro main program twice to get it back. It asks me to send in a crash report, which I do, not knowing if it’s helpful. Any idea what could be causing the crash?
I have a copy of the latest crash report here
There is a very low level system bug in 10.12 and 10.13 that is the primary cause of pretty much all Keyboard Maestro Engine crashes. This bug is resolved in 10.14. The crash typically happens after waking from sleep (hence "in the morning" is a common refrain).
I could not find any specific crash reports with your email address reported, but if you look in the diagnostics folder ( ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports folder ) (You can get to ~/Library in the Finder by holding down the shift (or option) key and selecting Library from the Go menu in the Finder), you will likely see Keyboard Maestro Engine crash reports. If you look at them, you will almost certainly see “BUG IN CLIENT OF LIBDISPATCH”.
I tried for years to resolve the cause of this crash, especially since it is the cause of 98+% of all Keyboard Maestro crashes), and enlisted people much smarter than me, but it turns out it is caused by a very low level system bug.
Thankfully, since 10.14 resolves it, the crash reports will trend down to essentially zero as people upgrade - I checked the last 20 crash reports and every single one is this crash on systems 10.12 and 10.13.
Even with this bug, Keyboard Maestro crash rate is very low, down around 1 crash per 600-user-days. Excluding this system bug crash, Keyboard Maestro’s crash rate would be under 1 crash per 10,000-user-days.