MacOS – Activate PressAndHold for LibreOffice or OpenOffice

internationalizationkeyboardlibreofficemacosshortcut

With most apps on my macos (TextEdit, TextWrangler, Skype, WeChat, Mail, Xcode, Android Studio, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) when I hold down a letter like E, I get the choice of accents to use from the PressAndHold popup:

e

Alas, when I switch to a powerful document editor like LibreOffice, I lose this ability to choose accents.

Note: Sierra and High Sierra

Best Answer

This feature is not supported by LibreOffice 5.3 according to this page. It's the same for 5.4 according to my tests. I did not try the dev version 6.0.

EricP 2017-06-01 01:56:19 UTC Comment 8

A few years later now... Press And Hold still does not work in LibreOffice, even though LibreOffice is now built against an SDK requiring MacOS 10.8 or higher (see comment 3). As indicated in bug 42437, comment 7, just an SDK update is not enough; adding this feature will require some developer time.

It is, apparently, possible to "add" Press and Hold support to some applications simply by typing a Terminal command similar to this:

defaults write org.libreoffice ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

but this does NOT enable Press and Hold in LibreOffice 5.3.

Related Question