Apple’s macOS now shows a palette with accented or alternate characters to choose from when you press and hold a key for any letter. For instance, if you press and hold the key with the letter “O,” you will get a palette with options like ô, ö, ò, ó, œ, ø, ō, and õ to choose from.
While this is handy, it is not useful for many users. Also, with this feature, the company has disabled the feature that allows you to press and hold the key for repeating the character or letter multiple times. This means you cannot press and hold the key and expect the letter to keep tying until you release the key.
However, you can bring back the key repetition feature on your macOS through a command entered in Terminal. Here is a step-by-step guide for the same.
How to enable key repetition feature in macOS
Step 1: Open the Terminal window on your macOS device. For this, you can press the Command + Spacebar keys to open the Spotlight. In the search bar, type Terminal and press Return (Enter). This will open the Terminal on your Mac.
Step 2: When the Terminal opens on your device, enter the following command and then press the Return key.
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
After you have completed the above two steps, log out of your account and then log back in. That’s it. The repeating key feature is now enabled on your device and you can press and hold any keys for repeating letters.
If you want to disable the feature, then follow the same steps as above but just change the command line in Step 2 to “true” instead of “false” at the end.
