What Is The 'hidd' Process on Mac

The 'hidd' process on Mac is essential for the smooth operation of the whole system. After all, the 'hidd' process is the one tasked with interpreting the signals coming from Mac's trackpad, mouse and keyboard, such as keyboard commands, trackpad gestures and mouse movements. It also handles inputs from third-party devices including graphics tables and game controllers. The name of the process stands for 'human interface device daemon.' 

'Hidd' will always be among the active processes running in the background of the system currently, but it will be the reason for any problems very rarely. If you still suspect that 'hidd' is the malfunctioning process specifically, start by checking the resources it is consuming in the Activity Monitor. 

Using Activity Monitor to Quit 'Hidd'

You can open the Activity Monitor from the 'Utilities' folder found under 'Applications.' Once the Activity Monitor appears, click on the CPU column and see if 'hidd' appears near the top among the processes taking up the most of CPU's cycles. If that is indeed the case, you may want to restart the process. Select hidd and press the 'Quit Process' button. Keep in mind that while hidd is restarting your mouse, keyboard, trackpad or third-party input device may become unresponsive for several seconds. 

Quit 'hidd' via Terminal

Open Terminal from the 'Utilities' folder found under 'Applications.' Once Terminal has started, type top and press Enter. You will be presented with information regarding the number of currently running processes, followed by a list of the processes themselves. Scroll through the list until you have located 'hidd' and write down its PID number somewhere. 

Now, type kill -9 [PID] (substitute PID with the number you wrote down) and press Return. This should force the 'hidd' process to restart.