10.7: Accent Picker Settings (enable, disable, and speed)

Jul 29, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: cycomachead

This seems to be a feature that's been piggybacking on key repeating, as described in this hint. Because of this, there are a few oddly behaved settings for the accent picker.

These settings reside under the Keyboard pane in System Preferences. Here you have a couple poorly worded options for the accent picker.

Key Repeat -- This setting is pretty much useless except for the 'Off' position. In the Off position NEITHER the accent picker nor key repeat work.

Delay Until Repeat -- Under Lion this is functionally equivalent to 'Delay Until Showing the Accent Picker' setting.

Now, there's no obvious way to disable the accent picker, but Terminal can help. Type:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Change that to true to re-enable the setting. Each time a restart is needed for the change to take effect.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. Keys don't repeat, and if there are no accent options for a letter, nothing happens at all.]

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110721122558299