this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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In typical Apple fashion, ‘that’s the neat part - it doesn’t’. If you want to be able to hold a letter to type it repeatedly, you have to disable the diacritics popup with a console command.
It’s the sort of stubborn ‘getting in my way’ feature that drives some people nuts when using a Mac, but in my experience it’s far more useful to be able to easily type accented characters than it is to be able to save half a second on the rare occasions I want to type ‘ooooooooooooooh’.
And yeah, if the popup is open you either hit the number displayed under the character you want or use the mouse to click on it.
Thanks, actually sounds like a useful feature!
Although as a SW dev I do regularly depend on the repeating character behaviour, but usually not for normal letters.
But typing stuff like:
/*********************************************************/
is pretty common for me and would be annoying without auto-repeat of the respective character...
If you're coding, your code editor may have some way to input that.
Some people who frequently input something like that use a snippet system.
In emacs, hitting most keys (like "*") runs
self-insert-command. That takes a numeric parameter, so one can just do something like/ M-5 M-6 * /(slash, hold Alt, type 56, hit asterisk, slash) to get a slash followed by 56 asterisks followed by a slash.I'm not really a serious vim person, but I'm sure that vim has similar functionality.
searches
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5054128/repeating-characters-in-vim-insert-mode
Looks like, in insert mode,
/ Control-o 56 a * Esc a /. Probably not using correct vim terminology for the keystrokes, but you get my drift.I have to reserve the limited keystroke remembering capacity of my aging brain to more crucial stuff, I am afraid...
Also, the tiny time span passing while mindlessly holding down the "*" key is a welcome pause to clear your mind, take a short breath and gather your thoughts on what the heck you are supposed to be writing in the comment body following the /**********/ line. ;-)
That would still work - asterisk isn’t a letter that can be accented, so the popup wouldn’t appear and the key would repeat as normal.