No keyboard menu in Catalina

catalinakeyboardmenu bar

I often have to type "weird" characters so I turned on the keyboard menu in macOS. Since upgrading to Catalina, it has disappeared and I cannot get it back.

In Settings->Keyboard->Keyboard I have "Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar" turned on.

In Settings->Keyboard->Input Sources I have "Show input menu in menu bar" turned on.

There is no menu item. Force quit of Finder and reboot did nothing.

Any suggestions?

Best Answer

I have also run into this problem, so far with no solution. There is however a workaround, from the question linked in the comments, which helps.

cmd-ctrl-space (⌘^␣) will bring up a quick emoji picker. There is an icon at the top right (circled in red) that will switch you to the system character viewer.

Once you have switched to the character viewer, you can navigate and insert characters as you normally would, just as if you had opened it from the input sources menu. Happily, once you have switched from the emoji picker to the character viewer the system will remember this choice, so the next time you hit ⌘^␣ you will get the full character viewer instead of the emoji picker.

It doesn't address the missing input sources menu, but for the specific task of adding non-standard characters I find it to actually be faster.

If you happen to know the code points you can also enable the 'Unicode hex input' input source. You can't switch the via the input sources menu, but you can use ctrl-space (^␣) to switch between enabled input sources. With the unicode hex input source enabled, opt-xxxx where xxxx is the code point number will insert a character.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Keyboard Viewer via keyboard shortcut wont actually quit after closing it

open -a and launch seem to keep it open as well. But if you show the keyboard viewer from the input menu and close the window, the process is quit immediately. So one workaround might be to emulate clicking the menu item:

tell application "System Events" to tell process "SystemUIServer"
    tell (menu bar item 1 where description is "text input") of menu bar 1
        click
        click menu item "Show Keyboard Viewer" of menu 1
    end tell
end tell

Also, I can re-open the application after closing it via a keyboard shortcut ONLY WHEN I open the viewer via the menu button or settings.

If all windows have been closed, activate doesn't usually open a new default window. reopen would do that, but it doesn't seem to work with KeyboardViewer.

Make certain menus always show ⌥option + click results

I don't know if there's a way to do exactly that, but if you can't be bothered to use the option key when clicking (maybe you're holding an instrument with the other hand or something?) then a keyboard shortcut to an AppleScript to change audio devices is probably even better.

Here's another question that addresses this approach, and if it's not quite what you're looking for, there are plenty of other people out there talking about this as well.

Best Answer

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MacOS – Keyboard Viewer via keyboard shortcut wont actually quit after closing it

Make certain menus always show ⌥option + click results

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