How to enable or disable the "Press and Hold"-menu in Mac OS X

Posted by Joost Saanen on 1-2-2016

I liked the “hold down key for special character”-feature which was introduced several years ago in Mac OS X a lot. For some reason – after doing some upgrades of Mac OS X – it stopped working on my macbookpro.

After digging and some seeking around I’ve found out that it’s possible to enable or disable this feature. This is how you can do it:

1. Open a terminal:

2. Enter the following command:

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   $ defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true
   

3. Stop and start your applicatons where you had the problem.

If you don’t like this feature, you always free to disable it by typing in the following command:

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$ defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false