Turn on Bluetooth on your Mac without a mouse or trackpad

So, you accidentally disabled Bluetooth on your Mac, and now you can’t use your wireless mouse or trackpad. You could dig out a wired mouse to reenable Bluetooth, but that’s a lot of effort. Instead, just use your keyboard to turn on Bluetooth on your Mac without a mouse.

We’ll show you how to get out of this computing pickle.

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Turn on Bluetooth on your Mac without a mouse

Toggling Bluetooth on your Mac is a quick and simple way to solve pesky connectivity issues. Turning Bluetooth off brifely often works wonders. For example, when your AirPods refuse to connect or your mouse pointer feels choppy and laggy.

Many of us forget, however, that most wireless mice and trackpads rely on Bluetooth for connectivity. And once you turn off Bluetooth, your mouse disconnects — and there’s no obvious way to reenable Bluetooth without it.

That’s fine if you’re using a MacBook with a built-in trackpad. But what if you’re using an iMac or some other desktop Mac, and you don’t have a wired mouse you can plug in temporarily? You might panic. But luckily, there is a way to turn on Bluetooth on your Mac with your keyboard instead of your mouse.

How to enable Bluetooth with your keyboard on Mac

Simply follow these steps:

1. Hold the Command (⌘) key then press the spacebar to open Spotlight Search.
2. Type Bluetooth then use your keyboard’s arrow keys to highlight Bluetooth File Exchange.
3. Press the enter or return key to open it.
4. Your Mac will recognize Bluetooth is disabled and ask if you want to reenable it. Simply hit the enter or return key again to confirm.

Bluetooth will now be reactivated, and within a few seconds, your mouse should be working again.

This Bluetooth trick works on macOS Sequoia as well as previous versions of macOS.

A restart may be necessary

Obviously, this method only works if you’re using a wired keyboard. If you own a Magic Keyboard or another one that relies on Bluetooth, then you will need to connect it to your machine with a cable for wired communication.

If connecting a keyboard or mouse to your Mac via USB isn’t an option, the other alternative is to reboot your machine by holding down the power button. When it boots up again, you’ll be prompted to connect your peripherals.

We originally published this post on how to turn on Bluetooth on your Mac without a mouse or trackpad on May 14, 2021. We updated the information.