How to disable new key sticky or drag lock feature?

[serr]

I don't know what this new feature is called exactly or where in System Preferences the control panel is.

There's a new feature - probably related to some 'tap drag' or 'sticky/lazy key' something or another. What happens is the first time you click the shift or command modifier keys to do something (eg. make a selection range, spot selections with ⌘-click, opening a link in a new tab with ⌘-click, etc), the modifier key is ignored. A 2nd click works as expected. (The 2nd click has to be within a few moments of the first or it 'resets'.)

I also notice a drag lock thing happening after only a first click attempt.

This feature is not for me!! Where is it and how do you turn this off? It's like trying to use a broken mouse or a trackpad on a Windows machine! (Neither of which I'm doing. And no my trackpad didn't just fail. Booting from old systems is normal. This is some intentional feature here.)

For example, it's impossible to make a range selection (in the Finder in list view) followed by ⌘-click spot selections (all in the same selection - starting with the shift-click range and then adding additional selections with ⌘-click) with this enabled.

 

[Yahooligan]

This sounds like some 3rd-party software problem, this is not how Sierra itself works by default and I can't find any way to do this in system prefs. Check for/disable/quit any 3rd-party apps that may be doing this (Icons up in the menu bar?) and see if stopping one of them makes this behavior stop.

 

[serr]

I just got off a chat session with Apple and they said point blank that this is a bug they are working on!

No 3rd party apps involved with this. Actually it's a barely out of the box clean install I finally decided to try out.

Pretty shocking sloppy bug with basic functionality for an Apple product. What you'd expect from the Windows camp I want to say.

I played around with this some more and I can get example of inconsistent behavior now. At first it seemed very reproducible (first modifier-click in weird mode then the 2nd modifier-click works) but it's not 100%. The occasional works the first time as well as the occasional doesn't work till the 3rd time.

I guess this must truly be a bug.

 

[Yahooligan]

Sucks that it's a bug and not a "feature", good that they are aware of it so hopefully the fix will be in the next update. At least now you know for sure!

 

[serr]

Disappointing for sure. Feels like barely a beta release so far.
Back to stable 10.6.8 for me until someone gets their act together!

What's the Linux community up to these days?
They start writing an audio engine for professional DAW work yet? Seems like the time is ripe.

 

[serr]

Follow up on the mystery feature/bug:
I notice that if you click the track pad with force (not absurdly, just slightly stronger than your lightest touch) the problem goes away.

So there's some tap force range feature gone awry or something. I normally use a light touch on a trackpad as well as use tap to click. I verified this beyond any doubt that it's not hardware failure. Trackpad is as responsive as ever in both 10.6 & 10.10. 10.12 needs to see a tap force above X or it ignores trackpad input. So they must have some new feature where they're parsing the force you tap with and it's not working correctly.

So there's your workaround. WORK that poor trackpad!

 

[serr]

10.12 seems to be chewing up over 2GB of RAM just idling! Nothing is crashing but something is sure broken. This OS is a wholly unfinished disaster. I think we're done here for now.

EDIT: This is related to nsurlsessiond & akd trying to call home every 5 seconds!
(Even with iCloud & App store disabled.) No one seems to know what else these services are working with. (Including Apple support! Which unfortunately looks either incompetent or dishonest and is most disappointing.)

 

[serr]

At least Apple admits this is a bug at present.

There's clearly an element of an underlying feature here where they are parsing the force you tap with. A light tap invokes some drag-lock feature intermittently. It's not simply that the trackpad can miss light taps. It is just as responsive as ever but intentionally in a different mode when this happens.

No more from Apple beyond "Our engineers are working on this."