Permissions

July 20, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Keyty needs macOS privacy permission to capture and display keyboard and mouse activity. If this permission is missing or granted to the wrong app build, input events may not appear in the overlay.

Required Permissions

Keyty uses the following macOS permission:

  • Accessibility: allows Keyty to observe input events needed for keyboard and mouse visualization

Granting Permissions

To grant permissions on current macOS versions:

  1. Open System Settings.
  2. Go to Privacy & Security.
  3. Open Accessibility and enable Keyty.
  4. Restart Keyty if macOS asks you to do so.

If Keyty is not listed yet, launch the app once and return to these settings after macOS has registered it.

Permissions in App

Keyty includes a Permissions pane in Settings that shows the current status of both permissions and provides an Open Settings action when access has not been granted.

Use this pane when setting up a fresh install or when diagnosing why input events are not being captured.

Troubleshooting

If Keyty is running but no keyboard or mouse activity appears:

  1. Quit Keyty.
  2. Open System Settings > Privacy & Security.
  3. Remove any existing Keyty entries from Accessibility if they refer to an older app build or moved app bundle.
  4. Launch Keyty again.
  5. Re-enable Keyty in Accessibility.
  6. Restart the app if macOS requires it.

Common causes:

  • The granted permission points to a different copy of the app than the one currently running
  • macOS has not refreshed the permission state until the app is restarted

For debug builds launched from Xcode, permission issues are especially common after rebuilding, moving, or renaming the app bundle.

Last-Resort Permission Reset

If the app is still listed in System Settings but macOS does not deliver input events, reset Keyty's saved privacy decisions and grant the permissions again:

  1. Quit Keyty.

  2. Run:

    tccutil reset Accessibility app.keyty.Keyty

  3. Launch Keyty.

  4. Re-enable Keyty in Accessibility.

  5. Restart Keyty if macOS asks you to do so.

These commands reset only Keyty's entries for the relevant privacy services. Avoid broader resets such as tccutil reset All unless you intentionally want macOS to forget privacy decisions for other apps too.