How to have character accent menu _and_ key repeat So it seems you have an either/or choice for the character accent menu or normal press-and-hold for key repeat behaviour.

Surely it's possible to have press and hold bring up the Character Picker accent menu, then - after a set delay - start repeating? Is there any way to enable this behaviour?
OK I think I finally understood what you want, and that is not possible.

Holding a key will bring up that character accents.

But you do not want to pick one you only want to have the pressed key repeat.

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So to do that you need following command in Terminal to enable it.

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false


Since the keyboard is initialized during the boot cycle, you need to restart for it to take effect.

To set it back just use True at the end instead of false.

Unfortunately that will disable the "Accents" pop up since those 2 functions are conflicting.

Writing a Script that switches the function for the press and hold is useless since you would need to restart anyway.