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So it seems you have an either/or choice for the character accent menu or normal press-and-hold for key repeat behaviour.

Surely it's possible to have press and hold bring up the Character Picker accent menu, then - after a set delay - start repeating? Is there any way to enable this behaviour?

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  • show us an example of what you trying to achieve! repeat what, the special character?
    – Ruskes
    Commented Jan 16, 2015 at 18:35
  • 3
    I think he means: he has it set so he can do à and á when he holds down the a key, but sometimes he just wants to do aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa by holding down the a key.
    – GEdgar
    Commented Jan 16, 2015 at 22:03
  • @Buscar웃 - e.g. Simply hold down 'a', up pops Character Picker then, if nothing picked within x seconds, 'a' repeats according to normal settings producing 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa'...
    – Turkeyphant
    Commented Jan 17, 2015 at 19:36

1 Answer 1

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+100

OK I think I finally understood what you want, and that is not possible.

Holding a key will bring up that character accents.

But you do not want to pick one you only want to have the pressed key repeat.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

So to do that you need following command in Terminal to enable it.

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Since the keyboard is initialized during the boot cycle, you need to restart for it to take effect.

To set it back just use True at the end instead of false.

Unfortunately that will disable the "Accents" pop up since those 2 functions are conflicting.

Writing a Script that switches the function for the press and hold is useless since you would need to restart anyway.

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  • @TomGewecke I am also aware that having both is not possible, since there is only one trigger (press and hold).
    – Ruskes
    Commented Jan 18, 2015 at 0:00
  • No. As I said: Simply hold down 'a', up pops Character Picker then, if nothing picked within x seconds, 'a' repeats according to normal settings producing 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa'... The question is how to have both.
    – Turkeyphant
    Commented Jan 19, 2015 at 0:07
  • I know, I got that, but it does not exist, there is a setting to delay the start of repeat, but I can not find a set up where the accent pop comes on first then after time set it changes in to repeat.
    – Ruskes
    Commented Jan 19, 2015 at 0:32
  • Hence my question...
    – Turkeyphant
    Commented Jan 20, 2015 at 1:43
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    Not exactly an answer, but you can start the accent by pressing Option - <accented sound> before typing the accented character. For example, I can type Option - E followed by E to type é, or maybe ó. This is how I enable key repeat and maintain the option to type accented characters. Hope it helps!
    – sayzlim
    Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 16:47

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