Fix held keys not repeating on Mac for gaming

You hold W to run forward and instead of moving, a little popup of accented letters — ẁ w̃ ẅ — appears over your character. macOS is treating your held key as a request for special characters, not a repeated keypress. One preference, ApplePressAndHoldEnabled, turns that behavior off so a held key repeats like it should.

Turn off press-and-hold

There's no switch for this in System Settings — it lives only in a hidden preference. Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities) and run:

# Let a held key repeat instead of opening the accent menu
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

# Undo — bring the accent popup back
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

The change takes full effect after you log out and back in (or restart) — apps read this preference when they launch, so a full session refresh makes every game and app pick it up. At minimum, fully quit and reopen the game you're fixing. This preference behaves the same on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.

Why gaming triggers it in the first place

Press-and-hold is macOS's shortcut for typing accented characters: hold a vowel in a text field and the accent picker appears. That's handy when you're writing, but movement keys in a game are held down constantly. Any game that reads keys through the standard macOS text input path — a lot of browser-based games, Electron titles, and some native ones — sees a held W as "the user wants accents for W," pops the menu, and swallows the repeat. Disabling press-and-hold removes that interpretation, so the key just repeats.

Two honest caveats. Games that capture raw keyboard input directly (many full-screen native and Steam titles) never showed the accent menu to begin with, so if a specific game already handled held keys fine, this won't change it. And if the game feels sluggish rather than showing a popup, the issue may be repeat speed rather than press-and-hold — see the tip at the end.

Check it worked

1. Run the command and log out, then back in.
2. Open TextEdit as a quick test and hold any letter — it should now repeat across the line instead of showing the accent picker.
3. Launch your game and hold a movement key. No popup, continuous movement.

If you ever want to type an accented character again after this, hold Option with the right key, or use the Emoji & Symbols viewer (Control+Cmd+Space) — press-and-hold isn't the only route to accents.

If movement feels slow, speed up key repeat

Press-and-hold and repeat rate are two different settings. Once keys repeat at all, you can make them fire faster and start sooner. See how to get faster key repeat for gaming on Mac.