Monterey 12 Beta 4 -Tab and spacebar issues all keyboards

Same thing with me since Beta 3 on an M1 mini. Thought it was first because of using ARD to run Parallels and was having tab/spacebar issues when doing that with everything in Parallels. Now at beta 5 arm and spacebar randomly not working. Will work with Notes, and Mi, but won't work in Excel or various screens in Parallels, at the same time In Parallels the space bar pops up the configuration menu. in beta 5 the spacebar is completely unusable for quick look, it causes a blue box to appear around the finder window. So, for me, Quick Look is totally unoperable.

Thought it was my KVM, but bypassing that didn't solve anything. Thought it was my Kensington keyboard and was due to my option & command keys needing to be remapped, but that wasn't it. Put back on an plain old ordinary USB Apple keyboard, but the same things happen with it too. Only thing I can do is to do when it happens is to do shift-spacebar to get spaces going.

I think it has to do with whether or not the program was coded in XCode.

I don't run into this problem with Safari, or TextEdit. but I do almost all the time with Chrome and the First Class programs which I'm pretty sure are not coded with Apple's development environment. But sometimes I can type correctly even in Chrome. I'm using a Razer Black Wido ultimate keyboard.

When the problem comes up, the space bar does NOTHING.

I was experiencing the issues you describe after upgrading to Monterey OS. In Facebook Messenger spacebar was not adding spaces but instead zooming the window open and closed. I had the same issue with the text feature of GIMP. The fix for me was to go to the Apple icon in the top left of my screen, then go to System Preferences>Accessibility>Keyboard and uncheck "Enable Full Keyboard Access", which I had selected when upgrading to Monterey. Full Keyboard Access is to help minimize the need to use a mouse or trackpad and apparently some apps are not natively translating what you may be intending to do. Hope this helps!

I had the same issue, and managed to resolve it by removing the shortcuts for input sources

Select The Apple on top Left > Select System Preferences > Select Keyboard Select the Shortcuts Tab > Input Sources > deselect both options (You shall see both use "Space" as part of the shortcut) Select Spotlight > Deselect both options here as well (Once again you shall note that Space is part of the ShortCut)

It appears that you have selected any shortcut where the space bar is a part of the shortcut, the space bar does not always work as a spacebar. I had this issue also in my VM-Ware Fusion app, and once I had applied the above changes, the Space bar worked in the VMware as well. I hope this helps you.

Just want to say thank you, Cloud007. This solved the problem for me. After 2 days of hunt and ****. Thank you. tbrian

I'm experiencing the same behavior as pcolvin15. Running Monterey 12.1 on a 27" iMac with 64GB of RAM. Occasionally (too frequently) the spacebar will not make a space. It causes a blue box to appear around the finder window. This doesn't occur in all app but does occur in Facebook and the Apple Email client. I'm using the default keyboard, mouse and trackpad that came with the iMac, plugged into the thunderbolt port except for the wireless mouse. Sometimes a reboot will solve the problem, but only temporarily.

I found am answer that fixed my keyboard problem, at least for the moment, I deactivated the Enable Full Keyboard Access from Settings > Accessibility > Switch Control, then I selected the keyboard item from the left pane to access the checkbox in question

here's the link for that page for the Apple support Communities https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253562342

Thank you too Cloud007. I had this problem using the space bar in ACE Money to space words in Account Comments. Solved using your tip. Had just got MacMini M1 and transferred data file from my previous Win 10 PC.