How to ENABLE iOS style accent pop-up menu

[fileasphogg]

Hullo everyone! I've recently updated to Mac OS X Lion, and am very happy with it (even the 'natural' scrolling!). The only fly in the ointment is the iOS style accent pop-up. I type in several languages, and have to use multiple keyboard layouts to accommodate the various accents, macrons and so on.. which is a bit of a pain. So I was excited about the iOS style accent pop-up menu system. Great!

But it isn't here. It doesn't happen. I can't find any option to enable it, and searching online only turns up people who hate it and want it removed... all of whom suggest changing the boolean operator for defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled in the terminal... I've tried it both true and false and it makes no difference: the key repeats or doesn't repeat, sure enough, but I never get the iOS style pop-up menu whatever I do.

Can anyone tell me how to access this lovely new feature (which so many people seem to hate, admittedly)? I'd be very grateful!

 

[Jumpie]

Well, it doesn't work in Firefox but it does work in MS Word.

Doesn't work in Gmail, either.

 

[QuarterSwede]

Are you using an English keyboard layout?

 

[fileasphogg]

Ah it seems you're both right - thanks! I had to use a default keyboard layout, AND the feature only works in some applications and not system-wide. This limitation, combined with the fact that there are still lots of characters I need to produce that it doesn't permit, means that this feature turns out to be of no use to me :-( And the same goes for anyone wanting to transliterate Arabic or Subcontinental languages, too - which is a really large pool of people...

It'll make people writing multilingually solely within European languages' lives easier, though, and I still think it's a good idea. Ideally, I think Apple should work on making it a properly system-wide feature, and offer some configurability (so that press-holding consonants, for instance, might also allow one similar extended options, to which one could add what one needed from the character map). As it stands, it seems to be a strangely half-baked version of what could become a natural extension of the way we use a keyboard, doing away with character maps and complex key combinations forever! I live in hope!

 

[Patrick J]

I have a Portuguese keyboard layout, but I often write in German.

This “feature” would have been very useful to me, but it doesn’t work. Dang.