Hold a key to repeat it instead of showing the accent menu — via Howard Oakley, The Eclectic Light Company
Commandlow riskmacOS 14 Sonoma and later
On a Mac, holding down a letter key pops up a menu of accented characters (é, è, ê…) instead of repeating the letter. That's annoying in code editors, games and Vim-style apps. One Terminal setting brings back normal key repeat.
Sign out and back in
The easy way
- Run the command, then log out and back in (or at least quit and reopen the app you type in).
- You can still type accents with Option key combinations or Edit > Emoji & Symbols.
Command
Run in Terminal (Applications › Utilities).
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool falseUndo
defaults delete -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled-g is short for the global domain (NSGlobalDomain), so this applies to every app. Howard Oakley notes the global value wins over any per-app value.Sources
- Accents or repeat: how is your keyboard configured? — by Howard Oakley, The Eclectic Light Company
- Key held down behavior — by Yann Bertrand, macos-defaults.com
- Source reviewed
- 2026-11-02
- Link checked
- 2026-11-02
- Tested hands-on
- Not by Oddbyte.Me
Oddbyte.Me hasn't tried this on every macOS version, so keep the undo handy.