MacOS – Accent popup in Terminal.app

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I was wondering if anyone has figured out a way to enable the press-and-hold accent popup in Terminal.app, where it does not work out of the box? Does not have to be press-and-hold, but some way to bring up the popup.

I'm used to the unix-style Compose key, but the accent popup seems like a good substitute, especially given that it should also be possible to configure it to support Greek alphabet (for maths), following the instructions in another question: How to add characters to the press and hold character picker in OS X Lion? . But if it won't work in Terminal.app as well, then I'll have to set up a Compose key as explained here: http://lolengine.net/blog/2012/06/17/compose-key-on-os-x .

Best Answer

This can be done with a bit of hacking. ;)

Before proceeding, you should backup your Terminal’s preferences file:

cp "Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist" "Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal_OLD.plist"

Check to see if the file was copied successfully:

ls "Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal_OLD.plist"

If it prints Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal_OLD.plist then you're good to go. Otherwise make sure you typed the first command correctly.

Now for the fun part, you can modify the internal settings of the Terminal by typing:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal "ApplePressAndHoldEnabled" -bool true

Close the Terminal completely by first closing all open Terminal windows and then right clicking the Dock icon and choosing Quit.

Open the Terminal again and smile :)

Let me know if this doesn't work on your system.

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