OSX Lion Key Repeat in IntelliJ

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I’m mildly obsessed with Vim, so of course I prefer to use similar input methods whenever available. I’ve been working on a Javaish project lately, and I ran into the alternate character feature in OSX Lion, which does not play nice with the IdeaVim plugin for IntelliJ.

After getting tired of repeating keystrokes a ridiculous number of times, I did some searching and came across many explanations of how to globally disable the feature. While the lack of key repeat is a problem in IntelliJ, I could imagine alternate character input being useful in other applications. Fortunately I found a helpful blog post with a fix for specific applications in the comments.

Here’s the exact terminal command for IntelliJ.

defaults write com.jetbrains.intellij ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false