With a Spanish keyboard, supposedly if I press Opt+e, then enter the letter I need with the accent, it should give me that. But I'm getting a æ instead. Has anyone come across this issue? Thanks.
MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
You can set up your Mac so that when you hold down a key, say the e key you'll get this menu to choose from:
Are these the type of accented characters you're wanting to enter?
Hit the number key of the accented letter you want or click on it with the cursor.
To enable this feature enter the following command in the Terminal app followed by the Return or Enter key:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true
To turn off change true to false.
Note: this removes the capability of holding down a key to enter multiple characters while the key is held down.
You can set up your Mac so that when you hold down a key, say the e key you'll get this menu to choose from:
Are these the type of accented characters you're wanting to enter?
Hit the number key of the accented letter you want or click on it with the cursor.
To enable this feature enter the following command in the Terminal app followed by the Return or Enter key:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true
To turn off change true to false.
Note: this removes the capability of holding down a key to enter multiple characters while the key is held down.
Hi,
Thanks a lot for your response. I tried this and restarted the computer, but it didn't work. However, I did find a solution by turning on the 'show keyboard viewer' And I guess it's because I'm using a full keyboard, the Opt+e doesn't work for me.
What worked was that if I hold down the orange accent keys and then press the letters I can get the accents.
Thanks again, happy holidays.
Mac's use the Spanish ISO keyboard, not Spanish. You may wish to change to that in system preferences/keyboard/input sources to make what you type match what is on the keys.
Neither Spanish nor Spanish ISO can use the option key shortcuts like option + e to produce accents. That is for the US keyboard.
Both should however show you accented characters in a popup menu if you hold down the vowel key.
Ah I see. Great, holding down the vowel key works. Thanks so much for your help!
I used to be able to do this -- to hold down a vowel and a pane would pop up with choices for the accent mark. It just recently quit working, right about the time I installed the last OS. In fact, I seem to remember having this issue before, that the ability to add an accent to Spanish words disappeared with an OS update.
I have never gone and fiddled with the Terminal app, so I found this some other way. Anyone know how to activate this feature for those of us who don't feel confident playing in the Terminal app?
Try going to system prefs/keyboard/input sources and adding a Spanish keyboard to your list and then restarting.
No change. 😟 It's just not working for me. I even went into Terminal and copied and pasted the string above. Restarted. Nada.
I just spoke with Apple about this as I have been unable to fix it on my own. We fiddled with a lot of things, removing and adding back the Español in languages and keyboard preference panes. I also saw that my keyboard repeat rate under the Keyboard System Preference was set at zero. I upped it from zero. After all the things we did, I restarted and the accent pane started appearing again. I think the keyboard repeat rate might have been THE thing that messed it up in my case. So, if you're having this issue, check there, too.
Cannot type Spanish accent marks
