Enable key repeat when holding a key on Mac

On Windows and Linux, holding a key spits out the character over and over — hold the down arrow and the cursor keeps moving, hold a dash and you get a long line of dashes. On a Mac, holding certain keys shows an accent menu instead, and repeat never happens. One preference restores the behavior you expect: hold a key, get repeats.

The default that surprises switchers

macOS ships with a feature called press-and-hold: hold a letter that has accented variants and, rather than repeating it, the system pops up a picker so you can choose é, è, and so on. It's meant for typing accents without a special keyboard. If you've come from another operating system, it just reads as broken key repeat. The good news is it's a single on/off preference — turn press-and-hold off and every key repeats when held, exactly like the platform you're used to.

Enable hold-to-repeat

There's no toggle for this in System Settings, so it's a quick Terminal command. Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities) and run:

# Held keys repeat instead of showing the accent menu
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

# Undo — go back to the accent menu on hold
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

Log out and back in, or restart, so every app adopts the change — apps read this preference at launch. To test it in a single app first, quit and reopen that app, then hold a key in a text field: you should see it repeat. The command works the same on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.

Set the repeat speed while you're here

Enabling repeat is step one; how fast it fires is a separate pair of controls, and switchers usually want them quicker than the macOS defaults:

1. Open System Settings → Keyboard.
2. Drag Key Repeat toward Fast for how rapidly a held key repeats.
3. Drag Delay Until Repeat toward Short for how soon repeating begins after you press.

Together with press-and-hold off, these two make held keys feel like they do elsewhere. If even the fastest slider position isn't quick enough, the rate can be pushed further from Terminal — see the tip below.

Accents when you actually want them

With press-and-hold off you keep every other way to type accents: hold Option and a key for a diacritic (Option+e then e gives é), or open the Emoji & Symbols viewer with Control+Cmd+Space. If you regularly write in a language with accents, adding that language's keyboard layout is faster than the popup ever was — so you lose nothing practical by switching repeat back on.

Push repeat past the slider limit

If Fast still isn't fast, you can set the key repeat rate beyond the System Settings maximum. See how to make key repeat faster than the settings allow on Mac.