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Lion special characters (holding key)

murdercitydevil

murdercitydevil

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 23, 2010
1,561
0
california
If you don't know this already, apparently there's a feature in Lion where pressing a certain key and holding it will pop up a small menu of special accented characters for that letter, for instance if I hold e, I can quickly select é. This would be great if I typed accented letters often. Except I don't. However, I often DO hold down a key to type things like "AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!" Well this option seems to be system-wide, affecting even Adium and Word, which is unacceptable. I can't even repeat non-accented characters like "Q," if I hold the key down it refuses to type more than one. How the hell do I turn this off?

EDIT: I just found the solution. If you want to disable this, open terminal and type

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
Click to expand...

Reboot, and it will be back to normal. Holy crap how is this not an easily configurable option??
 
N

NameUndecided

macrumors 6502a
Mar 28, 2011
751
68
Thanks for the tip on how to turn it off. But I say, anything that encourages the use and/or study of multi-lingual communications in lieu of making it a little easier for people to write "Aaaaaaaah" and "Nooooooo!"'s is perfectly okay with me. (I kid. Sort of. ;) )
 
E

eyespii

macrumors 6502
Mar 8, 2008
372
0
thanks so much for the tip! Amazing that there isn't an easily accessible option somewhere for this.
 
gr8tfly

gr8tfly

macrumors 603
Oct 29, 2006
5,333
99
~119W 34N
Thanks for the tip.

Just for fun, I thought I'd play with the key repeat settings. Guess what? Key repeat doesn't work at all. I tried the old standby of turning the feature off, then on; played with speed and delay - no affect. ('x' and 'd' were my test subjects)

If anyone can try key repeat and confirm what I found (or, tell me they have it working), it would be appreciated.
 
S

shrx

macrumors newbie
Jul 23, 2011
23
0
well it seems to work but not in all applications. in firefox it still doesn't.
 
gr8tfly

gr8tfly

macrumors 603
Oct 29, 2006
5,333
99
~119W 34N
Well, I did find a mode where key repeat does work: if you use the standard modifier key to get to a special character (such as opt-a), it'll repeat just fine.

But, no key, whether it has optional characters or not (like a 'd' or 'x') will repeat if held by itself.
 
M

mittgenstein

macrumors newbie
Dec 29, 2013
1
0
nice info - and here is how to reverse it...

hi,

i actually had the opposite problem: my keyboard suddenly did not recognize the hold-key-function anymore. so going to the terminal and typing in

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

enables the special characters option - which, btw, is a great tool for bilingual people... :D (don't forget to restart the computer...)

cheers!
 
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