MacBook – this macbook keyboard popup bubble

accessibilitykeyboardmacbook pro

While I am typing, my macbook randomly (to me anyway) pops up a speech bubble with alternative characters. I can be flying on typing the rest of the sentence before I realise a number of characters have not typed. I do not understand what triggers this to appear. Does anyone know what this bubble is and how to turn it off?

It must be some accessibility feature? But I cannot see what the setting is and how to turn it off?! Its driving me crazy!!

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Update:

OK, so thanks to replies I know now it is the mac accent character picker. But I'm not holding down a key when it appears, I'm typing normally without pause. Before I turn it off completely as suggested, is there any sensitivity setting I can check to confirm how long it waits for a key to be held down?

If not, I guess it might indicate a hardware problem with my keyboard then and turning it off completely is the only option.

Best Answer

This is the character picker for entering accented characters. This appears when you hold down a key on the keyboard. This can be disabled globally using defaults:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false