HT201586: How to type accents, emoji, and symbols on your Mac

Learn about How to type accents, emoji, and symbols on your Mac
labashoney

Q: How to type accented letters...

When I hold down a key to get my accented characters to show it just repeats the letter. I checked system preferences and the key repeat is on. It used to work fine...not sure how to fix.

macbook pro, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Mar 27, 2016 5:14 PM

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Q: How to type accented letters...

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  • by pinkstones,

    pinkstones pinkstones Mar 27, 2016 5:18 PM in response to labashoney
    Level 5 (4,209 points)
    Safari
    Mar 27, 2016 5:18 PM in response to labashoney

    labashoney wrote:

     

    When I hold down a key to get my accented characters to show it just repeats the letter. I checked system preferences and the key repeat is on. It used to work fine...not sure how to fix.

     

    I don't know the fix to make the pop-up menu return, but in the meantime you can press Control + Command + Space to bring up the Character Viewer, and you can insert your accented character(s) from there.

     

    Screen Shot 2016-03-27 at 8.17.39 PM.png

  • by Tom Gewecke,Helpful

    Tom Gewecke Tom Gewecke Mar 28, 2016 5:14 AM in response to labashoney
    Level 9 (79,055 points)
    Mar 28, 2016 5:14 AM in response to labashoney

    labashoney wrote:

     

    When I hold down a key to get my accented characters to show it just repeats the letter.

     

    Try going to system preferences/keyboard/input sources and adding a french or spanish keyboard and then restarting.

  • by VikingOSX,

    VikingOSX VikingOSX Mar 27, 2016 5:56 PM in response to labashoney
    Level 7 (20,606 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 27, 2016 5:56 PM in response to labashoney

    Launchpad : Other : Terminal.

     

    Copy and paste the following into the Terminal, and press return. Quit Terminal. You may have to log out and back in again for the setting to take. Then, you can just press and hold certain letters (e.g. c, u), and an array of character choices appear. You can click the individual character, or enter its number index to get that character into your text.

     

    defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

  • by labashoney,

    labashoney labashoney Mar 28, 2016 5:16 AM in response to Tom Gewecke
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 28, 2016 5:16 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

    This worked, I had to highlight the Lithuanian keyboard in input sources and restarted.Thanks!