In today's article I am going to explain a way of working that you probably do not know or have not used in the macOS system. However, surely when you read what I am about to expose you will see that you have been using Press and Hold for much longer than you think. and it is a fundamental process in devices such as the iPhone or the iPad.
Press and Hold consists of holding down a certain key so that the operating system shows you more variants with respect to the key that you have held down.
If you think about the operating mode of iOS you will realize that when you write, if you want to put a tilde on a vowel or put a different symbol on top of a vowel, what you have to do is hold down the key on the screen so that I am shown a floating menu with the other options.
Well, in macOS, there is the same possibility and it is called press and hold. If you try to hold a key capable of offering you more possibilities, a balloon is displayed in which we are given the option to select other options by pressing different figures. In case that key does not have associated symbols, what happens is that the writing of it is repeated.
So far everything is very easy, but the problem is that there are situations in which we must press and hold a key by the data entry method and we do not want the options to be displayed by figures. This way of working can be modified through the Terminal using the following command:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
If instead you want to return to normal operation you must write:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true