The Easy Way To Type Accent Marks And Other Letter Variations On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look how easy it is to type accent marks and other letter variations on your Mac. 

Now when typing on your Mac sometimes you want to include an accent mark or some  other variation when typing a letter. Some of you may know this trick and use it often but others may not have discovered it. It comes in super handy if you need to type anything beyond standard letters. 

I'm going to start off here in Pages as an example. Note that I have a US English keyboard but I'll show other keyboard variations in a few minutes. So let's say I want to type a word and I need an accent mark at this point. I could just type the letter e there and just leave it at that or there are other tricks. Like, for instance, you may know that using Option e and then e again will get me an accent mark. Using the Option Key like that goes way back but it is very difficult to remember and you can only type a few different accent marks that way. 

If you want a complete set of what's available it's actually really simple. Instead of just pressing and releasing the e key on the keyboard, press and hold it. Then you get this menu that appears here. You can continue to hold down e while you decide which variation to use, or you can just release it. Then you can make a selection from one of the variations shown here. You can do that one of three ways. One is that you can use your pointer and simply click on the variation that you want. Like that. Another is that you can use that number underneath it. Just press that number on your keyboard and that will select it. A third option is to use the Arrow Keys. Use the right arrow first and it will select the first one there. Then you can use the right and left arrows to move around. When you see the one you want press Return. This may seem like a little extra work but one advantage of it is you actually see the character below as you move over it like this. So if you're working in a graphics app and you really want to see the details in the letter before you select it you can. 

Now this works in just about any app. So for instance here I am in Notes and I can use this with the letter a and then I'm going to use number 1 to select the character. Here I am in Mail composing a message. I can hold down the letter c and I'll use the arrow keys here to make sure I get the right one and press Return so I can type that word correctly. It even works in Safari when typing in an input field like this. You can use it, like that, to type accent marks and other variations. 

These characters are all included in Standard Character Sets. So it is not some special Mac thing to have these accent marks like this. When you submit this form or send an email the other person will see it just fine. Here's it working in a Graphics App, Pixelmator Pro. So if it not just for areas where you're typing large amounts of text. It will work here as well to type a variety of different accent marks as you need them. 

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Now keep in mind not all letters have these. For instance if I press and hold a these are the options I get. But if I press and hold q I get nothing. There are no accent marks or variations for that. The letter w just gives me one. Here's the letter c that gives me four. But here's how that changes when you have a keyboard from a different region or you've setup your keyboard to act like one from a different region. 

So in System Settings if you go to Keyboard and then you go to Input Sources you can see I've added four different input sources here. Now typically you want only one input source and that's to match the keyboard you've got. So I have a US English keyboard so I would just have the US English keyboard here. But if you have a keyboard from another region then you would want to have it set to that. macOS allows you to have multiple ones here. So you can see while my keyboard stays the same, the actual physical keys are the same, I can switch to say a Danish keyboard, a Greek keyboard, or a Latin Keyboard. Of course I'm not going to see these letters on my keyboard. They are printed on there. But if I know how to use this keyboard well enough I should know which key matches to which letter. 

Now switching between these keyboards does change which options you get. So, for instance, look at the letter a here when I'm using the US keyboard. These are the options I get right here. But look what happens if I switch to the Danish keyboard. If I type the letter a you can see I get different options for a now. The same for other letters as well. If I switch to Latin American I'll get different options there too and if I switch to Greek I'll get different options. As a matter of fact only one option there for a. Here for the letter i on my keyboard I get three different options. 

Now here are some other little tips. If you want to Dismiss this you can. You can do it by just typing the next letter. If it doesn't get a number it knows to just ignore that. You can do it also with, say, a space. It will just ignore it. Another way to dismiss this is to simply use the Escape Key on your keyboard. This works with capital letters as well. So if I press and hold a you can see what I get. But if I do shift and press and hold A then you can see I get upper versions of these. Now, of course, you have to press and hold and there's a slight delay before this appears. You can actually change the length of that delay. If you go into System Settings and then to Keyboard, at the top you've got Key Repeat Rate and Delay Until Repeat. Now these both seem to have to do with repeating things. Which doesn't work with letters. If you press and hold a you get these character variations. But it does work with anything that's not a letter or a number. 

So, for instance, if I press and hold the equals key it will repeat the equals key, like that. How quickly it repeats is the Key Repeat Rate. How long it takes until the first repeat is the Delay Until Repeat. But this setting also affects how long it takes for the accent marks to appear. So, if I set this to Short and then I press and hold a, it very quickly shows me the options. But now if I set this to Long and I press and hold a, you could see it takes a lot longer for those to appear. So if you find you want this to appear more quickly you can go all the way here. It doesn't really effect things to have things appear because even if it appears quickly the next thing you type is just another letter or space or punctuation. It ignores it. 

So open up a sample document right now and give this a try. See which of the letters produce variations this way and try some of them out. This way the next time you need an accent mark or character variation you'll know how to get it pretty easily and quickly. It may be that you rarely ever need this but some of the people that type accent marks and character variations often think that this may be one of the best features of macOS. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.