this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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How does macOS discern between wanting to use diacritics and just trying to write the letter multiple times in a row?
And how do you choose the version you would like to use (I assume by selecting the numbers printed below)?
And yes, I have never used a Mac in my whole life up to now and am therefore completely clueless ;-)
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...
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.