Wacom tablet not responding

For a while now, my Wacom Intuos M will not respond when I unplug/replug the device or when my laptop goes into a sleep mode.

I had discovered that opening Activity Monitor, finding all Wacom processes, and force quiting them fixed the problem.

However, I assumed that Claude would be much better at troubleshooting it then I am, so I asked it for input. Claude shared this with me:

Here’s what’s happening and three ways to fix it, simplest to most automated.

The why: Your Wacom daemons (TabletDriver, WacomTabletDriver, WacomTouchDriver, com.wacom.IOManager) lose track of the tablet when USB power state changes (unplug → plug in). They don’t re-enumerate the device cleanly. Killing them works because launchd immediately respawns them fresh from the .plist files in /Library/LaunchAgents/ — that’s why the force-quit “fix” works. This is a years-old known Wacom-on-macOS bug that their driver still hasn’t solved.

Three options:

1. One-command shortcut (manual, but 1 second instead of 10)
Replace the Activity Monitor dance with a single Terminal command or Raycast script:

killall WacomTabletDriver WacomTouchDriver TabletDriver com.wacom.IOManager

launchd respawns them. You can wrap this as a Raycast script command or an Alfred workflow with a hotkey.
Trade-off: still manual, but trivially fast and zero dependencies.

2. Wacom Desktop Center built-in restart
Open Wacom Tablet Utility (it’s installed alongside the driver) → “Restart Tablet Driver” button. Does the same thing as option 1 but GUI.
Trade-off: still manual, slower than the killall, but no terminal needed.

3. Auto-restart on wake/USB re-attach (fully automated)
Install sleepwatcher via Homebrew and have it run the killall whenever your Mac wakes:

brew install sleepwatcherbrew services start sleepwatcherecho 'killall WacomTabletDriver WacomTouchDriver TabletDriver com.wacom.IOManager 2>/dev/null' > ~/.wakeupchmod +x ~/.wakeup

Now every wake event nukes the Wacom processes; launchd respawns them clean before you’d notice. Caveat: this fires on every wake, not just unplug/replug — but a 200ms restart of background daemons you can’t see is harmless.
Trade-off: one-time setup + a small background service, but you stop thinking about it forever.

I think that for now, I’ll just keep using my very manual approach. It happens at most a few times per week, and not everything needs to be automated. Maybe Wacom will finally sort its driver out.