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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

That you can hold down certain keys, like i and o, to access a list of similar characters that aren't found on the keyboard.

My 1 year old taught me that one.

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I actually turn that off - https://osxdaily.com/2011/08/04/enable-key-repeat-mac-os-x-l... - so it's easier to write things like noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

It's one of the first things I turn off. annoying.

I also have repeat set to fastest and delay until repeat the shortest.

May not produce the same feel, but there is:

  defaults write -g NSRepeatCountBinding -string "^u"

> This default controls the numeric argument binding. The default is for numeric arguments not to be supported. If you provide a binding for this default you enable the feature. This allows you to repeat a keyboard command a given number of times. For instance “Control-U 10 Control-F” means move forward ten characters.

— https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

There are also easily memorable keyboard shortcuts for common accents in languages that use roman script. E.g. Opt+e followed by any character places an acute accent on that character. Opt+u adds an umlaut, etc. etc.

I've switched that off many years ago so I forgot that's even a thing. In my opinion the best way is to get hold of those characters with the option key. So if you need ñ you can just type option-n + n, or option-o for ø.

One can be forgiven for finding this after long years of useage, because it didn't used to be the case. I'm not sure when it was introduced, but it was in a (to this oldster) recent version.

It was introduced sometime after that feature became standard in the iOS keyboard. So yes, it is a relatively new feature.

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