Character Picker stopped working in OS X Lion

Question

Character picker inexplicably stopped working tonight in OS X Lion. I was trying to type in Spanish but now the keys which used to accept tildes or accents are merely repeating.

I tried entering the following command in Terminal and restarting my MacBook Air, but it didn't restore the Character Picker:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool TRUE

I also checked which keyboard I am using for input. I am still using the U.S. keyboard, and that hasn't changed.

I tried logging out, restarting, and shutting down.

Is there anything else I can do to restore Character Picker?

Answer 1

You can try disabling it.

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool FALSE

Then reboot. If you want to reverse this change, you can enter the following to change the feature back to be enabled.

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool TRUE