Cleankey is a tiny, free macOS menu bar app that temporarily locks your keyboard so you can wipe down the keys without triggering accidental keystrokes. Flip the toggle to clean off your greasy fingers from your keyboard and be happy.
Wiping down a Mac keyboard normally fires off a storm of keystrokes. Apps open, text disappears, the volume jumps, you write your ex. Cleankey blocks all keyboard input system-wide with a single toggle, so you can clean your greasy keys safely and at peace.
Cleankey installs a system-wide event tap at the HID level and catches key events before they reach any app. While blocking is active, Cleankey drops every keystroke, including modifier keys and media keys like play/pause and volume. Toggle it off and everything returns to normal. Your trackpad keeps working all the time, so you can easily enable your keyboard again.
- Device Control and Data Acces (called Accessibility on macOS 26 and earlier) lets Cleankey suppress all key events
- Input Monitoring lets Cleankey receive the key events
- macOS 13.0 (Ventura) or later
- Works on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs
Cleankey automatically follows your selected OS language. The interface currently supports English, German, French, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Italian, Russian and Japanese.
Two options:
- Download the .zip archive from the "Releases" section here and drop
Cleankey.appinto/Applications(or wherever you want). - Download the whole repository, build the project in Xcode and drop
Cleankey.appinto your/Applicationsfolder.
Click the Cleankey icon in the menu bar and flip the toggle off. Your mouse and trackpad keep working the whole time it is locked, so you always have a way back.
No. Cleankey throws key events away while the lock is on. It never reads them, saves them or sends them anywhere, and it does nothing at all while the lock is off.
You did not grant both permissions yet, so Cleankey cannot activate it's keyboard lock. The menu tells you which one is missing. Grant it, then quit Cleankey and open it again, because macOS applies new permissions only on a fresh launch.
Made by Nick Ringelmann