greendog

Think I solved the issue for me. I suspect it'll help RickA and others who are having the same issue: Although I disabled Alfred's <ctrl> modifier in the "Advanced" settings, I missed another default use of <ctrl> in the "Features" settings. Disabling <ctrl> in the Features -> File Search -> Actions -> Show Actions preference pane has made "ctrl as escape" work reliably for me! Screenshot attached. Hope this helps others... Mike

I'm experiencing the exact same problem, but with a different keyboard mapping utility. Alfred seems to be the common factor. Instead of Karabiner, I'm using Hammerspoon to remap my Control key (and therefore my Caps Lock key which I have remapped to Control via Apple's keyboard settings). It's mapped so that if I just tap Control, it acts as an Escape key. If I hold it down and use it as a modifier, it acts like a normal Control key. This is a fairly common remapping, which will likely see a lot more usage now that Apple's dropped the hard Escape key from the new MacBooks. The mapping command I'm using in Hammerspoon to send an Escape key when the Control key is pressed is: hs.eventtap.keyStroke({}, "ESCAPE"). This should look exactly like an Escape keypress to Alfred. In Alfred (3.1.1), normally the Escape key will close any Alfred search/action window that's open, and my keyboard's hard Escape key still functions correctly with Alfred. However, the remapped Control key is usually recognized correctly by Alfred as Escape, but sometimes it is not. This appears to vary based on the Alfred function being performed. For example, if I open Alfred and type "33+33" to do some math, tapping Control is always correctly recognized by Alfred as Escape, and Alfred closes his window. Similarly, if I enter "empty" to start emptying the trash and then tap Control, Alfred correctly closes. However, anything involving file search doesn't work as expected, such as entering "pref" to open the System Preferences app, or "pict" to open the Pictures folder, or "in mike" to search inside of files. In those cases, pressing Control causes Alfred's results list to flash briefly and remain on the screen, instead of closing. In Alfred's "Advanced" preferences I've changed "Ctrl+<enter> = Search with default web search" to a blank action, but this hasn't helped. I realize this may not truly be an Alfred issue, and is more of an interaction problem between Alfred and keyboard remapping tools (two so far, Karabiner that RickA was using, and Hammerspoon that I'm using), but given the loss of the hard escape key in a couple weeks with the new MacBook Pro launch, I suspect keyboard remapping may become more popular. Let me know if I can be of any assistance in troubleshooting, or if this is too esoteric a problem to look into for now. Thanks! Mike