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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

If you hold down an alphanumeric key in MacOS, it automatically pops up an emoji selector. This is fine, except if you are someone (like me) who occasionally holds down keys to take advantage of key repeat _and_ uses vim keybindings in a few specific non-terminal applications.

There is no GUI to disable this behavior, you have to drop to a terminal, run a command, and then reboot the machine.

This is the example I now use whenever a Mac user says Linux is a pain to configure.

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  defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

and while you're here, check out these other fixes:

expand the save dialog by default:

  defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool true
  defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode2 -bool true

don't save .DS_Store to network locations

  defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

bring up the hidden dock faster

  defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.15;

Shut up gatekeeper

  spctl --master-disable

I had almost forgotten how much annoying manual fixes you need to make this system usable, until I went through my notes...

Thanks for the helpful tips. Tangential but is there any free way to change the scroll direction of trackpad and mouse independently and to disable scroll acceleration? I have tried Mac Mouse Fix but it is not free.

I used LinearMouse to disable scroll wheel acceleration.

https://github.com/linearmouse/linearmouse

I also know of this, but have not tried it: https://github.com/emreyolcu/discrete-scroll

There are a ton of useful preferences like these that make OS X behave in ways that I find more natural. TinkerTool (https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool) has a nice “missing system preferences” GUI for configuring them. I’ve been using it for at least 15 years, but you can still download old versions for support all the way back to OS X Public Beta in the year 2000. It was one of the first things I always installed way back when defragging hard drives and occasional clean system installs were routine maintenance.

I know we’re talking about this in the context of much-loved utilities going sideways, but if tweaking system prefs is your thing it gets a strong recommend.

I really wish there was a way to disable .DS_Store on local/removable storage as well. I don’t know why but it completely bugs me having these files when I want to never customize folder views.

There used to be this brilliant utility with a brilliant name called Asepsis that let you corral the files into a specific folder (like the vim cmd directory for .swp files), so you could have the functionality without the mess, or wipe them out like (or using) a tmp dir.

Unfortunately, when SIP arrived you had to disable it to get the functionality and it died off.

One or two defaults settings would do it, c’mon Apple! There’s a reason for not shitting all over network drives, why not local storage as well?

Whenever you hold down a key in Linux, it always repeats, and there is no GUI to turn this into an accented character selector. Or any other means because there is no such selector to be had. Not a big knock on Linux though, because it has a working compose key instead.

Also, you don't need to reboot after toggling ApplePressAndHoldEnabled, but you do need to restart apps.

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