How to re-enable Accents feature on Mountain Lion 10.8.2

A quick tutorial on how to enable the Accents feature again on Mountain Lion 10.8.2. You can do that with this simple Terminal Command.

Apple included some of the interesting features that only limited users got used to. One such feature is the ability to change the accents of the letters you’re typing. But this feature was disabled for some reason in the latest Mountain Lion 10.8.2 update.

Some users, including me, got used to this feature before the update, but then, there’s a way to re-enable this feature on your Mac, running Mountain Lion 10.8.2. This comes in conjunction with the Key Repeat tutorial which I wrote a while back.

How to re-enable Accents feature on 10.8.2 when a key is long-pressed?

  1. Fire up Terminal app on your Mac.
  2. Now, type the following command: defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true
  3. Press Enter, and you’re done.

Once this is done, check if the feature is working using text edit or any place where you could type.

  • Ken Parker

    Thanks for a clear fix for a frustratingly obscure change that was silently slipped in a point release. I thought I was going crazy remembering the behavior differently.

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