The hand tool will randomly appear (sometimes with shortcut, sometimes not) and then refuses to go away no matter how many times I hit spacebar or escape. I have to quit and relaunch illustrator to fix.

The hand tool will randomly appear (sometimes with shortcut, sometimes not) and then refuses to go away no matter how many times I hit spacebar or escape. I have to quit and relaunch illustrator to fix.

I have this same issue — NOTHING is working for me.

From ridiculous suggestions like "it's the keyboard" to stories of "just turn these options off", this problem seems to have been plaguing at LEAST AI for several years now. I mean sure, I'm willing to test anything to get the software to work but come on. I thought when 24 came out and suddenly I was not having the problem immediately (on a mac) that MAYBE somebody finally found the issue and resolved it. Nope. This is hopelessly ridiculous and wholly unacceptable given the prices we pay for this product. Solutions like shut down your browsers, turn off dictation...these do not SOLVE anything, they PATCH at best. How many of you don't have any browsers open and have NEVER turned on accessibility or dictation options and still have had the problems. How does adobe find this acceptable? Turn off virus protection has been my personal favorite. Come on. If technical support cannot reproduce then they are using unrealistic configurations and software on their test machines. For the record, I work in BOTH windows and mac environments...and the windows version, for me anyway, has never had this problem...but the mac is just hands down so much faster using any of the adobe products. Why oh why is there not a final solution on this...yet ?

I was also using on MacBook Pro and had the same issue. Took two months for tech support to email me back, by the time they did I found the answer online. I did the same thing as Jamie mentioned and the problem was resolved.

I was having this issue as well on my MacBook Pro. I ended up figuring out Illustrator is the culprit. I could use InDesign and Photoshop fine, but the second I opened Illustrator, my cursor seemed to stick as if I'm holding the mouse button down even when I'm not.

I did some more research while on hold with Adobe Illustrator Tech Support and found out that the voice Dictation functionality conflicts with Illustrator. I confirmed this with the Adobe Tech who answered my call as I was discovering the answer.

It immediately made sense to me since the issue only cropped up after I'd enabled the Dictation feature in System Prefs/Accessibility a few days ago.

Here's how I solved it:

Go to System Prefs/Accessibility
Scroll down in the left panel and select 'Dictation'
Uncheck everything

If everything is already unchecked:

Go to System Prefs/Keyboard
Click the 'Dictation' tab
Select 'Off' for Dictation. This disables any type of voice dictation system-wide.

There you go! I hope this helps!

Happening across CS for me, a restart fixes it for a few minutes. Only since accessing using Go To My PC now I'm working from home.

That happens to me too. Same OS and Illustrator version.

The "workaround" is to click off in any browser and then click back in Illy and it should go back to the selection tool. I haven't had a chance to try that out yet. One of my coworkers told me that, but I wonder if it's just click outside Illustrator and doesn't have to be a browser window.

Anyway, I feel your pain. Hopefully they will get it worked out.

Illustrator stuck on Hand Tool. I can click on any of the other tools (ex. Type Tool) but the cursor never changes and functionality remains stuck to Hand Tool... I CAN'T EDIT OR CREATE ANYTHING!

Still happens in October 2019. Illustrator is useless and restarting the app won't work. Sometimes works if I restart the Mac altogether, though that is not productive to do every time AI has a bad day...

Macbook Pro Mid 2015
macOS Mojave 10.14.6
Illustrator 23.1.1

Selection tool will default to Hand tool after sitting idle, and I cannot choose another tool. This will apply to all open files. After 5-10 minutes, it will switch back on its own.