Editor’s Note: This tutorial was written and demonstrated for Mac OS X Lion 10.7

Interestingly, in OS X Lion, the feature for key autorepeat has been disabled. This means that while previously, pressing and holding down a key on your keyboard would input the letter/character multiple times, continuously, until the key was released, in Lion you will have to re-press the key to get the same results. But luckily, thanks for Belchak.com, we’ve found a way to get past this, using Terminal. Here’s the code:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Thanks to a tip of TUAW, apparently you can also set this option “true” or “false” for individual apps. How? The “-g” in the terminal command means “global,” so you’re changing this as a universal option. TUAW claims that by changing the global domain to something like the “backwards domain name” you may have seen Apple apps frequently use, such as com.apple.TextEdit, you can set this option per an app-by-app basis. Useful.

As one may have guessed, to re-enable this feature, just change “false” back to “true” using Terminal:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

That’s it!

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