Turn off the accent character popup on Mac

When you type fast, holding a key for a fraction too long makes a little box of accented letters — à á â ä — pop up over your text and hijack the next keystroke. If you almost never type accents, that popup is pure friction. One preference switches it off so a held key just repeats instead.

Switch off the popup

The accent popup is the ApplePressAndHoldEnabled feature, and there's no checkbox for it in System Settings — it's a hidden preference you set from Terminal (Applications → Utilities):

# Turn off the accent character popup
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

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

Log out and back in (or restart) for it to take effect everywhere, since each app reads the preference when it launches. To test one app right away, just quit and reopen it. The behavior is identical on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.

What changes when the popup is gone

With press-and-hold off, holding a letter does what it does on most other keyboards: it repeats the character. Hold a and you get aaaaaa. That's usually what fast typists actually want — the popup was the thing getting in the way, not a feature you were reaching for. Nothing else about typing changes: autocorrect, text replacement, and your keyboard layout all behave exactly as before.

The one thing you give up is the press-and-hold route to accented characters. If you write mostly in English and only occasionally need a résumé or a café, that's a fair trade — and the next section covers faster ways to get those characters when you do.

Still type accents when you need them

Turning off the popup doesn't strand you without accents. macOS has quicker methods that don't interrupt your flow:

• Option key combos — hold Option and a key for a diacritic, then type the letter. Option+e then e gives é; Option+n then n gives ñ; Option+u then u gives ü.
• Emoji & Symbols viewer — press Control+Cmd+Space, search for the letter, and insert any accented variant.
• Text Replacement — in System Settings → Keyboard → Text Replacements, map something like cafe1 to café for words you type often.

For people who type accents constantly, the popup was never the right tool anyway — a dedicated layout or the Option combos above are faster.

Cut the other typing interruptions too

If the accent popup annoyed you, autocorrect and smart quotes probably do as well. See how to turn off autocorrect on Mac to stop your words being rewritten mid-sentence.