How to Type Accented Letters on Mac (é, ñ, ü, à)

Café, jalapeño, naïve, über — the Mac types them all without switching keyboards. There are two built-in methods: the press-and-hold popup, which asks nothing of your memory, and the Option dead keys, which are faster once learned. Here's both, plus the fix when the popup refuses to appear.

Method 1: hold the letter

1. Press and hold the base letter — hold e for é/è/ê/ë, n for ñ, a for à/á/â…
2. A small popup appears above the cursor showing every available variant, each with a number beneath it.
3. Click the one you want, or just type its number. Keep holding and press Esc to bail out.

Uppercase works the same — hold Shift+E and you get É and friends. The popup borrowed its design from the iPhone, and it covers vowels, n, c, y, and most letters that take diacritics in European languages. If a letter has no variants, holding it does nothing (or repeats — see below).

Method 2: Option dead keys, for speed

Old-school and faster: press an Option combo, release, then type the letter you want accented. The five that matter on a US layout:

• Option+E then a vowel → acute: é á í ó ú
• Option+` then a vowel → grave: è à ì ò ù
• Option+I then a letter → circumflex: ê â î ô û
• Option+U then a letter → umlaut/diaeresis: ü ö ä ë ï
• Option+N then n, a, or o → tilde: ñ ã õ

A few characters come straight from single combos: Option+C is ç, Option+' is æ, Option+O is ø, and Option+Shift+/ is ¿. Nothing to enable — dead keys have worked since the classic Mac OS days, and they work in every app, including ones where the popup doesn't. Two small extras: to type the bare accent mark itself (say a lone ˜), press the dead key and then the space bar; and capitals combine naturally — Option+E then Shift+E gives É, no extra steps.

When the popup never appears

If holding a letter just repeats it (eeeeee), the press-and-hold feature has been disabled — usually by a developer who wanted key repeat for a code editor and turned it off system-wide. Restore it in Terminal:

# Re-enable the accent popup (log out and back in, or relaunch apps)
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

# Undo: disable the popup again and get key repeat instead
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

The same key is the answer in reverse if you're a vim-style navigator who wants held keys to repeat: set it to false, knowing the Option dead keys above still cover your accents. Some individual apps (notably several code editors) override the global setting for themselves, which is why the popup can work in Notes but not in your editor — check that app's own settings before blaming macOS.

Typing a lot of one language?

If every third word needs an accent, stop fighting and add the real layout: System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → Edit… → +, then add Spanish, French, or German. Dedicated layouts put the common accents on their own keys — and you can flip back to US with Ctrl+Space. For one-off exotic characters — Polish ł, Czech č, anything with an unusual mark — the Character Viewer (Ctrl+Cmd+Space) has everything, searchable by name, and remembers your frequently used picks. Between the popup for occasional accents, dead keys for speed, and a proper layout for volume, the Mac covers every tier of multilingual typing without a single download.