How to enable Key Repeat in Mac OS X Lion?

Mac OS X Lion has replaced the typical Key Repeat feature with a cool context menu to insert some characters of the letter.

This might be annoying for some like me, since we don’t really use this feature. This trick mentioned below will disable this feature thus allowing you to get back the typical Appleeeeeeeee kind of repeating letters.

This does not work with all the applications. This works only with applications that use the default NSTextField to get inputs from the keyboard. The repeatable keys trick does not affect the default apps like Terminal, TextEdit, etc.,

 

How to enable Key Repeat in Mac OS X Lion:

  1. Fireup Terminal.app
  2. Now, just type the following command to set the boolean value to False for ApplePressAndHoldEnable event.
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

This will set the boolean for ApplePressAndHoldEnabled to False. Thus disabling the Lion’s context menu popup on long key press.

  • BMOC

    why isnt this an option in System Preferences?…

    • May be the option would come in the next big update of OS X Lion? Let’s wait!

  • Nur

    Thanks for you input but even since the repeat feature works fine in the terminal, it doesn’t in all other apps (Safari, Firefox, etc). This is really strange and a MAYOR step-back for Apple I believe.

  • Smaller external keyboards have been introduced for devices without a built-in keyboard, such as PDAs, and smartphones.

  • This is really interesting and fantastic to read and i must appreciate you for sharing this post with all of us.

  • Pingback: How to re-enable Accents feature on Mountain Lion 10.8.2()

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