Problem with swatch pallette

I am having the same issue, and it's actually occurring throughout the app. It seems that clicking items/objects/etc is being misinterepted as an attempt to move that item. It is happening for type styles, colors, clicking objects on the actual artboard, trying to thread text boxes, and many more. InDesign is completely unuseable for me currently. 

Yep. Done that several times. 

Let's dive a bit deeper and if I'm repeating anything I apologize but there's a lot going on here.

Is the swatches panel docked or floating? Can you apply swatches from the Control panel? Can you apply them from the Color panel? Can you apply them to styles?

Hi Franck.
Same issue here in France. And it started yesterday too.
And before any Updates… Very strange and very frustrating !
Updating OS or Indesign doesn't fix anything - cleaning and deleting cache or prefs doesn't either.
Correcting old files is painfull and quite IMPOSSIBLE to create new ones.

I'm having the EXACT same issue in InDesign 2025, and I see it's also been written up over on InDesign's UserVoice page. When clicking a swatch, it highlights momentarily and then nothing happens. I have this problem occurring when applying swatches to both shapes and text. It happens in last year's Adobe InDesign 2024 as well. I should add I uninstalled every Adobe app, including CC app, and then ran Adobe's CC Cleaner utility. The issue is there as soon as I reinstall. For what it's worth, I'm on an M2 MacBook Air, 16Gb RAM, and running macOS Sequoia 15.1.1 (the latest release version). It was fine this morning and then BOOM this afternoon. 

★ I should add that, at the same time the swatches ceased functioning, so too did my ability to apply a new font to a text box. I select the text box, then proceed to any of the various flavours of font selection dropdowns. I am able to hover my mouse down through the font list and I see the live preview of the font in my selected text box… however, I'm unable to click and apply the font. I have, on a few occasions, been able to click furiously about 10–12x and had it apply, but it's almost never the font I wanted to apply, because I can't click that fast without shaking the cursor somewhat, which inadvertently chooses a different typeface. All of these swatch and font clicking issues exist both with my mouse connected and using the built-in trackpad. There is no problem in Illustrator or Photoshop.

In general, I've noticed InDesign has slowed down quite a bit this afternoon, which might be a coincidence, but probably not. I'm not sure what happened here, but something is very off.

Thanks,

Steve

Maybe problem is with the latest 20.0.1 update? 

Yes, having the same problems here suddenly. Both the Color Palette selection issue AND the Font selection issue.

InDesign 20.0.1
macOS 15.1.1
iMac Retina 5K 27-inch (2020), 64GB

Panel problems are generally caused by corrupt preferences. Try resetting them.

Hello @franks65267173,

Thank you for reaching out! To help resolve the issue, could you please confirm the following:

• What version of InDesign are you using?
• What are the details of your system (e.g., operating system, specs)?
• Is this issue specific to a particular file, or does it happen with all your InDesign documents?
• Could you share a screen recording demonstrating the issue? This will help us better understand what's happening.

Looking forward to your response!

Best,
Abhishek Rao