Internal keyboard randomly stops working (after upgrade to Catalina) - any way to reset it?

Question

Is there anything like a reset of the internal keyboard device that I can try doing instead of having to restart my MacBook completely?

• The internal keyboard on my MacBook Pro just stops responding to key presses at a random moment (and stays like that). After restarting, it works again.

• it happened 7-8 times already, every time in the middle of typing something. It also happened twice while I was typing this question.

• Trackpad continues to work normally.

• It happened while I had an external keyboard connected, as well. Actually, two of them, both Apple keyboards -- one wireless and the other USB. Both of them, and the internal keyboard, stopped working at that point. When I re-connected a keyboard, it continued working again (only the reconnected one).

Answer 1

This appears to be a Karabiner bug (at least in my case).

Answer 2

Here are a couple of workarounds in the form of an answer so people can find them easily, since this Karabiner bug is still bugging us actively:

1. Disable Caps Lock key (so it doesn't happen)

MacOS System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... and here set Caps Lock to No Action

One easy workaround is to simply disable the Caps Lock key entirely, if that is an acceptable option for you.
If you have to yell around the Internets a lot, try the next one:

2. Kill karabiner process (when it happens)

In Terminal: sudo pkill -f karabiner

This seems to be enough for some people to get their keyboard working again without having to restart, but some say it does not work for them.

If you don't have an external keyboard to connect to type this out, or if you don't already have this command copied somewhere to simply paste it into the Terminal, you can use the "Keyboard Viewer":

Click the Input menu in the menu bar, then choose Show Keyboard Viewer.

_{^{Credits to Jyosua and iwill (Mr. Ming) from the Github Issue page for the second workaround}}