Unshaky
There is a small program, called Unshaky written on Swift. It fixed this issue for me. It lets you configure a timeout for each key to suppress duplicate keypresses. For instance, if the 'e' key is giving you trouble, you can configure the timeout for a longer duration and adjust for the best results.
- Antonyms for unshaky include rickety, broken-down, decrepit, derelict, dilapidated, ramshackle, shaky, tottering, unsound and unsteady. Find more opposite words at.
- (Temporary) Software fix with aahung's Unshaky app. First of all, I got the Macbook Pro 2018 13-inch 2.3 Ghz i5 model, purchased from an Apple Premium Reseller in my home country (no Apple Store unfortunately). Just would like to mention one key issue that has/had affected me since my purchase just over a month ago. Keyboard problem.
Over the last three years, I've occasionally been using a MacBook Pro 13-inch 2018. Unfortunately, it has been the worst laptop experience of my existence!
It was an upgrade to a MacBook Pro 13-inch 2015, and aside from the Apple Touch Bar, it would be fair to consider it superior to its predecessor. However, I started noticing something unusual once I started using it for writing - I kept making mistakes.
Like many, I'm a touch typist and quite comfortable using most keyboards. If I switch to a new keyboard, it sometimes takes some time to get used to the shape of the keys, the spacing between them, and how they feel. So at first, I assumed this unusual feeling came from typing on a brand new keyboard. Over time, I noticed a pattern in the mistakes I was making. Sometimes I would double type a letter, e.g. e, or I would miss the letter entirely.
It starteed gtting on my neervs.
My typing slowed down as I was often typing in anticipation of these mistakes, and it became an overall distraction.
I found similar reports shared online, and I was relieved at the suggestion that it might be a hardware issue with the 'butterfly keyboard', rather than a deterioration of my ability!
Through this search, I also discovered an attempt to address the issue with software. It's called Unshaky, and it attempts to dismiss erroneous key press registrations, i.e. those that occur no later than x milliseconds after the previous one. It's not perfect and it doesn't solve all the issues, but in the following screenshot you can see some of what it caught over just a few months:
Unshaky Big Sur
It has been a terrible experience in general, and I look forward to leaving this machine behind me. What follows is a list of keyboard complaints taken from the Unshaky README1
- Apple Discussion: MacBook Pro 15' (2018) Keyboard 't' key repeating issue? (55K have this question too on Feb 22, 2019)
Unshaky https://github.com/aahung/Unshaky. ↩
Unshaky App
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I wrote recently about my MacBook Pro keyboard issues worsening, and the difficulty in getting it resolved given the time I’d be left without my machine.
A reader helpfully pointed me to an interesting software-based solution for a hardware problem – and it has solved 95% of my issues …
Unshaky is a simple Mac utility that monitors keyboard input, and then blocks anything it thinks is a double-press caused by a keyboard fault.
Unshaken Synonym
The app works by asking you to register it as an accessibility device. It then registers each keypress and blocks any repeated press within the next 40 milliseconds. The delay is user-configurable, with the developer recommending you stick with the default unless it doesn’t solve the problem, and then try first 60ms and then 80ms.
The app allows you to either set a universal timeout, or to configure them individually for each key.
You can see Unshaky at work. If you tap the menubar icon, it shows you how many keypresses have been dismissed – and you can also open a live debugging window.
Accessibility apps are potentially very dangerous, especially ones which control keyboard usage, as they could easily be used to install a keylogger. However, Unshaky is open-source with the code available for inspection on Github.
I’ve been using it for a week now, and it has almost completely solved my issues. I’m no longer seeing any doubt-activations. As both my spacebar and CMD keys were affected, I initially found that it was blocking Spotlight (CMD-Space), but there’s a checkbox for an experimental feature to cure that, and it works for me.
One thing it won’t solve, of course, is keypresses that aren’t being detected – where you get nothing instead of a double character. That happens to me every now and then with the CMD key, but it has completely solved the vast majority of my issues.
I will still have to get the keyboard replaced at some point before the 4-year service program deadline, but Unshaky is a godsend in the meantime.
You can download Unshaky here.
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