Character Accent Menu not working in High Sierra?

I've spent some time on this trying all the suggested ways: add French or Spanish input keyboard, setting keyRepeat to OFF, etc etc.

what did it for me(I fixed this on my machine, and a co worker that brought this to my attention) was "defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true" followed by a power cycle(I didn't try restart, I went the safer route and tried shut down instead).

My key repeat is set to one tick before "Fast" and my delay until repeat is set to 3 ticks after "Long"(I believe these our default) and only have US as my input source keyboard (not US -International).

Again, it was only after setting the flag in terminal for NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled followed by a power cycle did this get fixed consistently.

hopefully this helps others

Verify >System Preferences>Keyboard>Keyboard> Key Repeat slider is not set to ON

Type accented characters

To type an accented or alternate version of a character, hold a key down until its alternate characters are displayed.

To choose one of the characters displayed, type the number that appears under the character, or click the character you want to use. If you decide you don't want to type an accented character after holding a key, type another character, or press the escape (esc) key.

If no additional characters are available for the key you're holding, the pop-over menu doesn't appear. The menu also doesn't appear when the Key Repeat slider is set to Off in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences.

ref:How to type accents, emoji, and symbols on your Mac - Apple Support

Hi everyone!

I think we solved the problem over here. Based on some previous suggestions we started messing around with the different keyboard inputs. (System preferences/keyboard/input sources/+) and we added a French keyboard.

We then changed the keyboard input to the French keyboard and restarted the computer.

When the computer restarted the accent Accent Menu worked on the French keyboard and continued to work when we switched back to the English keyboard. All the accents (not just the French ones) were available in the Accent Menu.

Hope this helps!

This worked for me:

got to applications/utilitiesm double click terminal and paste this command at the cursor

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

and hit return

Log out or shutdown and log back in

I simply restarted the computer and it came back, no need to do anything else. When this happened to me, I noticed that if I brought up the keyboard viewer, it wouldn't respond to the keyboard, but the keyboard itself still worked. So I thought "something must have happened to Apple's custom driver and the OS might be using a fallback input driver at the time". Restarted. Hold-for-accents-etc came back on. Mildly annoying.

I have had this problem for months and have tried all of the versions of rewriting the terminal code, fiddling with the keyboard slider, etc. Tom's "Any virus stuff installed? It can mess up things like this," was the mother lode. I had added the Webroot SecureAnywhere checker some months ago--about the time this happened. I turned off the virus checker and suddenly I'm back in business! Thanks, Tom. More points to you!! Webroot needs to get its act together and figure out how not to interfere with the Mac's elegant architecture.

I just solved this problem by logging out and then logging back in to what turned out to be my Admin. account. Voilà: the character accent menu was back and so were my missing passwords and accounts!

Thank you!! It was set to FAST, so it wasn't registering the separate clicks! Moved the KEY REPEAT slider towards the middle and all is working now! Very much appreciated!

shinkyo81 wrote:

Having the same problem. That was a great keyboard funcionality in MacOS and now it is gone. 😟

It's only gone for a few users with some problem in their install.

Have you tried a safe boot

macOS Sierra: Start up in safe mode

Or adding keyboards?

Or changing settings in system prefs/keyboard/keyboard?

Or setting up a new account and seeing if you have the problem when logged into that?

Stu Farnham wrote:

The repeat slider is off.

Have you tried it with the repeat slider in the middle or on Fast?

Any antivirus stuff installed? It can mess up things like this.

Have you also tried safe boot? new account? remove antivirus app?

The simple log out is enough to solve the issue.

lets see High Sierra public release ( v. 17A365) ex. éèêëēėę

Try opening a guest account and see if it works i that environment

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2012), macOS (10.13.0), i7 480GB SSD 16GB RAM iPhoneSE iOS10.2, Parallels10.0.2, HP OfficeJet Pro 8620

I just followed your advice and added French as an input source, restarted, and now the Accent Menu works just fine. Many thanks. By the way, Key Repeat is On, Delay is short, but key repeat does not work for any character whether it has available accents or not.

Hang on--

My reply seems to be disconnected from the suggestion.

The suggestion that worked for me was to make sure that the repeat slider was turned OFF.