Repeating-characters in Lion

2 points by r4dius 14 years ago | 2 comments

My UX senses are tingling all over! I have just uncovered a crazy ninja feature in OSX Lion and I needed to share it with the world. Go to an input text field or a textarea - any one will suffice (even your address bar). Try pressing and holding a key on your keyboard. What happens? Well, depending on which key you held down, it'll be different. For the majority of them, Apple has secretly killed off fat-finger syndrome by not allowing you to enter repeat characters without lifting your finger and pressing again. From now on, if something is over 9000, that's four individual keystrokes...

Letters that still allow you to press/hold: e, y, i, o, a, s, l, z, c, n. In addition, all symbols (tilda, comma, etc.) still allow you to press/hold. The other letters (and all numbers) are one-and-done. Apple, you crazy.

ddagradi 14 years ago |

Sorry, not "ninja". It's the first one listed under "Text" here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#text

You can disable it from the terminal: http://lifehacker.com/5826055/make-your-keyboard-keys-repeat...

r4dius 14 years ago | |

Interesting that they would make such a sweeping change to just add this "Character picker" functionality. Reading that description on the Apple site, I never thought it would mean anything for the non-accented characters. So - KINDA ninja, right? :-)