I recently rebuilt my Mac, I do this periodically as a habit from my Windows days I haven’t managed to break yet, but at least it is only once every major version, instead of semi-yearly with Windows. The exercise is good for me, though, because I find little tools and tweaks that I have forgotten to commit to my ansible file. This one such example.
While NeoVim is my code editor of choice, I use VS Code because it is the standard at the non-profit I work with. Since I have become HOOKED on the workflow of Vim, I have the awesome Vim plugin installed. I was building a playbook for EKS upgrades and noticed this little irritation.
What is the ‘press and hold’ feature on MacOS?
There is a feature in MacOS for typing accented letters and
diacritics
that involves pressing and holding a key down. Since Vim uses hjkl as motion
keys, you often press and hold one of these motions as an, inefficient, way of
navigating. I should be using the motions more efficiently, like 10l to go
to characters to the right, but often sometimes I am just too lazy. With
the ‘press and hold’ feature in MacOS, the result is trying to use characters
like ł instead of a long string of l characters moving me to the right.
Let’s fix that.
Turning off ‘press and hold’ for VSCode
To turn off this feature, only for VSCode, you can run the following command in your terminal. Then you will have to restart VSCode for this to take effect.
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
To re-enable this feture in VSCode, you can run the opposite command.
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true