Is my keyboard faulty or are my settings screwed? Something is wrong with my keyboard or Mac settings for key repeat rate and delay.

My Keyboard settings are as follows:



Yet when I hold down my keys one of two things happens. 
  A) The character only appears once or
  B) I get foreign character options such as:



I tried the terminal commands from How to increase keyboard key repeat rate on OS X? to no avail.

I tried resetting the NVRAM to no avail.

I tried rebooting my Mac to no avail.

What does work is I can use the Keyboard Viewer and if I click on a character (such as ’S’) I do get sssssssssssssssss, but if I press the physical S key the Keyboard Viewer shows the keypress but I only get the same foreign character options again.

So, is this a physical fault on my keyboard or what??
No, your keyboard is almost certainly not faulty. In fact, if you hold down some keys, such as the full stop . or space keys you should see that they repeat just fine.

Assuming that’s the case, you have one of two options:


keep your Mac as it currently is and use the Keyboard Viewer with your mouse if/when you need to repeat other characters, or
totally change the default behaviour so that you don’t get the popup with special characters.


If you opt for the 2nd option, then you’ll need to do the following:


Run the following command in terminal:


defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false


Restart your Mac


Now you’ll have your keys repeat the way you want.