touchbar-reset

A tiny macOS background service that restarts the Touch Bar whenever you open your MacBook lid or wake it from sleep — fixing the common bug where the Touch Bar goes blank after the laptop has been closed (especially when undocking from an external display).

Tested on a MacBook Pro (M1, 2020) running macOS 15 (Sequoia).

How it works

A small launchd daemon runs a shell watcher that polls the lid state (AppleClamshellState from the IORegistry) every few seconds. It triggers a Touch Bar restart on two events:

1. Lid opened while awake — e.g. clamshell mode with an external display, detected as a closed → open transition.
2. Wake from sleep — closing the lid usually sleeps the Mac, which freezes the watcher process. A poll cycle that takes far longer than its interval is a reliable "just woke up" signal, with no extra dependencies.

On either trigger it runs killall TouchBarServer and killall ControlStrip, and launchd immediately respawns them, so the Touch Bar reinitialises.

Because TouchBarServer runs as root, the watcher must run as a root LaunchDaemon — hence the one-time sudo at install. After that it runs automatically at every boot with no further prompts.

Install

sudo bash install.sh

Uninstall

sudo bash uninstall.sh

Activity log

The watcher logs lid changes and resets to /var/log/touchbar-reset.log (auto-trimmed to the newest 500 lines):

cat /var/log/touchbar-reset.log

The touchbar-reset command

The installer creates a touchbar-reset command (a symlink in /usr/local/bin), so you can control the daemon from anywhere:

touchbar-reset --status
sudo touchbar-reset --once

Flags

With no argument the script runs the watcher loop (how launchd starts it). It also accepts:

Flag	Action	Root?
--once	Reset the Touch Bar now and exit (manual "fix it now")	sudo
--pause	Stop resetting until --resume; the daemon stays loaded but idle (persists across reboot)	sudo
--resume	Resume after a --pause	sudo
--status	Show daemon state, pause state, current lid state, and the last log lines	no
--uninstall	Remove the daemon, script, logs, and pause marker	sudo
--version, -v	Print the version	no
--help, -h	Show usage	no

Examples:

touchbar-reset --status
sudo touchbar-reset --pause
sudo touchbar-reset --resume
sudo touchbar-reset --once

--pause works by creating a marker file (/usr/local/var/touchbar-reset.paused) that the running daemon checks each cycle, so it takes effect within INTERVAL seconds without unloading the service.

Checking your version

touchbar-reset --version                 # the version actually installed
./touchbar-reset.sh --version    # the version in this repo

The installed version is also recorded in the startup line of /var/log/touchbar-reset.log.

Configuration

Edit the values at the top of touchbar-reset.sh, then re-run sudo bash install.sh:

Variable	Default	Meaning
INTERVAL	5	Seconds between lid-state checks
WAKE_GAP	12	A poll cycle longer than this means the Mac was asleep

Files

File	Role
touchbar-reset.sh	The watcher loop (installed to /usr/local/bin)
design.westerlund.touchbar-reset.plist	LaunchDaemon definition (installed to /Library/LaunchDaemons)
install.sh / uninstall.sh	Install / remove the daemon

License

MIT — see LICENSE.