Learn how to change whether the character typed in a text area in apps on your Mac repeats faster or slower when holding down a keyboard key.
When you hold a key on your Mac’s keyboard, the underlying character is entered repeatedly. The handy setting, labeled Key Repeat makes typing on a keyboard more efficient as you can hold a key to type words like “yipeeeeeeeeeeeeee” or “yaaaahoooo” faster.
macOS provides a simple way to change the behavior of long key presses, so follow along with our steo-by-step tutorial below as we show you how.
Enable key repeat on a Mac
1) Open Terminal from your Applications/Utilities folder or via Spotlight search.
2) Paste this command into Terminal and hit the Enter key to run it:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
3) Restart the current app for the setting to take effect. When you press and hold a key for a brief moment, its character should repeat indefinitely.
System Settings, the built-in app to manage your Mac settings, lets you adjust key repeat rate and delay. Select the Keyboard option in the System Settings sidebar, then drag the “Key repeat rate” and “Delay until repeat” sliders found in the Keyboard section on the right.
On older macOS versions, you’ll find these settings in the System Preferences app instead.
Revert back to typing accents
One thing I’ve always liked about Macs is the ability to type accented characters when spelling non-English words. By holding down a key, I can choose a diacritic character from the floating menu. For example, the “u” key produces a menu with the letter “ü” and its variants. Similarly, holding the “e” key lets you type the letter “é”, and so on.
Unfortunately, this handy feature clashes with the Key Repeat setting. If typing accented characters is more important to you, tweak the above Terminal command by changing “false” to “true”:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true
That’s all it takes to turn off key repeats in favor of alternate characters via the press-and-hold shortcut. Whether you prefer key repeats or alternate characters, toggling between these two settings is a breeze in Terminal. For more tips on quicker ways to accomplish tasks on your Mac, be sure to browse our keyboard shortcuts section.
Do you have your own productivity tips for using a keyboard on the Mac? If so, please share them with the community by leaving a comment down below!
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