Secure Input, and why your key sounds go quiet

Updated October 25, 2026

When a password field has focus, or Secure Keyboard Entry is on in a terminal, macOS stops passing key events to every app that watches the keyboard. A keyboard sound app such as Teclo then plays nothing until Secure Input ends.

What Secure Input does

Apple’s technical note on it is direct: once any process turns on secure event input, macOS stops “passing keyboard events to any intercept process”, “whether that process is in the foreground or background”. An event tap, the way keyboard sound apps hear keys, is one of the intercept methods the note names.

Teclo’s tap is a listen-only tap on your login session, watching key presses, key releases and modifier keys, plus mouse buttons, scrolling and trackpad gestures. While Secure Input is on, the key events never reach it, so it has nothing to play. Nothing is wrong with Teclo or its Input Monitoring permission, and nothing needs restarting: the next key after Secure Input ends makes its sound again.

Apple’s note covers keyboard events only, so we expect Teclo’s mouse click and scroll sounds to keep playing while the keys are quiet (inferred from the note; we have not tested every app).

What turns it on

Apple’s note also asks developers never to leave Secure Input on “for the life of the application”. An app that ignores that, or that crashes while a password field has focus, can leave it on after you have moved on. That is the case worth finding.

Find the app that holds it

In Terminal, this command prints a process number while any app has Secure Input on, and nothing when none does:

ioreg -l -w 0 | grep -o '"kCGSSessionSecureInputPID"=[0-9]*'

Then name the process with ps -p followed by that number. We checked both commands on macOS 27.0 by turning Secure Input on from a test program. The first printed a process number, and the second named it: a web browser that also had Secure Input on, not our test program. The command shows one holder at a time, so run it again after you deal with the first.

To release it, leave the password field, untick Secure Keyboard Entry in that terminal, or quit the app. Logging out releases it in every case.

What this means for a keyboard sound app

No app with Input Monitoring can hear keys during Secure Input; that is the point of it. Kachunk lists “Password fields are always silent, automatically” as a feature; for standard password fields, macOS’s Secure Input already does that for every keyboard sound app, Teclo included (our inference from Apple’s note). If your key sounds stop only in some places, Secure Input is the likely cause. If they stop everywhere, see keyboard sound app not working, and for the permission itself, Input Monitoring on a Mac. How Teclo’s tap compares with other ways of watching the keyboard is in is a keyboard sound app safe?.