Your Mac ignores quick Caps Lock taps on purpose — a hidden 75 ms delay buried in macOS. FastKey flips Apple's own switch, so every tap lands. Like it always should have.
14-day trial, everything unlocked £4.99 once Notarized by Apple
Since 2007, Apple's keyboard driver holds every Caps Lock press hostage for 75 milliseconds. Release the key too soon and the press is thrown away — no toggle, no light, nothing. It was meant to stop accidental brushes. It also eats the taps of anyone who types fast.
It's not your keyboard, and it's not your fingers. It's one line of Apple source code:
// IOHIDFamily — IOHIDKeyboardFilter.mm
#define kCapsLockDelayMS 75Two Caps Lock keys. The left one behaves exactly like your Mac right now — hold it under 75 ms and the press is swallowed. The right one is running FastKey. Tap both, fast, like you type.
75 ms gate
0 ms
The app ships this exact test for your physical keyboard — ⇪ menu → Tap Test — counting raw hardware presses against registered toggles, so you can prove the fix on your own Mac.
macOS ships a sanctioned override for this exact delay — a documented keyboard property called CapsLockDelayOverride. FastKey sets it to zero using Apple's own hidutil tool. No key remapping, no kernel extensions, no drivers.
There's a free one-liner that flips the same switch — until macOS quietly wipes it. That's the part FastKey automates: it keeps the fix applied, verified, forever.
The override is wiped on every reboot, and silently dropped when you plug a keyboard back in or wake from sleep. FastKey re-applies it at login, on every keyboard connect, after every wake — then reads it back to verify it stuck, retrying until it does.
Built-in, USB, Bluetooth — new keyboards get the fix the moment they connect. Nothing to configure.
The Tap Test window counts raw hardware presses vs registered toggles on your real keyboard. Watch macOS eat your taps, then watch FastKey stop it.
Under 2 MB. No Dock icon, no accounts, no analytics, no subscription. A CLI ships inside for the terminal-inclined.
We'd rather you fix the delay than suffer it. FastKey is simply the version that stays fixed.
| Terminal one-liner | Karabiner-Elements | FastKey | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Removes the 75 ms delay | Yes, until macOS wipes it | Yes, as a side effect | Yes, and keeps it removed |
| Survives reboot & reconnects | Hand-write a LaunchAgent | Yes | Automatic, verified |
| What it installs | — | A virtual keyboard driver + background daemons | One 2 MB menu bar app |
| Setup | Terminal commands + plist files | Install driver, grant permissions, enable a "complex modification" | Open it once |
| Verifies the fix actually took | Read-back + Tap Test |
FastKey lives in the menu bar as a small ⇪. Everything it knows is one click away — including the proof.
Physical presses: 5
Registered toggles: 5
Last press → registration: 2 ms
✅ Every press registered — Caps Lock is instant
The built-in Tap Test, on your real keyboard.
macOS 13+ · Apple Silicon & Intel · Your license key arrives right after checkout.
No, and here's the actual reason rather than a reassurance: the override lives only in the keyboard driver's memory. It is never written to disk, firmware, or NVRAM — we verified this in Apple's own IOHIDFamily source. Rebooting without FastKey returns your Mac to factory behavior, always. The worst possible outcome that exists is "the delay comes back."
macOS requires that permission for the system's keyboard-property tool and for the Tap Test, which counts presses of the Caps Lock key — and only that key, filtered at the hardware level. FastKey has no analytics, no network calls except license activation, and the full source code is public on GitHub, so you don't have to take this on faith.
The fix switches off and Apple's delay returns — nothing else changes, nothing nags on a timer. Buy a license (£4.99, once, 3 Macs) and it switches back on. The Tap Test stays free forever, so you can always see the difference.
Yes — built-in, USB, and Bluetooth. This is actually FastKey's whole job: macOS silently drops the override whenever a keyboard reconnects, so FastKey watches for connections and re-applies it within a second, then verifies it stuck.
Yes, and we compare against it honestly above: a terminal command flips the same switch until macOS wipes it — every reboot, many sleep/wake cycles, every keyboard reconnect. Making it permanent means hand-writing LaunchAgents and still never knowing when it silently stopped. £4.99 buys the version that stays fixed and proves it.
The override is a documented Apple property that has survived every macOS release since it appeared, and FastKey verifies the fix took effect rather than assuming. If Apple ever changes the mechanism, updates are free and the app will tell you honestly in the menu bar instead of failing silently.
30 days, no questions asked, full amount. Email syrianapps.business@gmail.com and it's done. See the refund policy.
Download FastKey, tap Caps Lock, and feel your Mac finally keep up.
14 days free · £4.99 once · Undo anytime