One of the more arcane changes in Lion, the newest version of Mac OS X, is that certain keys don’t repeat if you hold them down. The ones that do repeat are the keys that also have diacritics, like ñ or ø. In some apps like Safari or TextEdit, holding one of those characters brings up a menu of diacritical options. Cool! But it doesn’t work yet in Chrome.

For reference, here’s the key repeat alphabet, as tested by an Apple forum user:

aaaaaa
b
cccccccccc
d
eeeeeeeeeee
f
g
h
iiiiiiiiii
j
k
llllllllllllllllll
m
nnnnnnnnnnnnnn
ooooooooooo
p
q
r
sssssssss
t
uuuuuuuuuu
v
w
x
yyyyyyyyyyy
zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Numbers don’t repeat, but every single punctuation mark and special character on the keyboard does. So you can still make ASCII art.

##      ## ##     ## ######## ######## ####
##  ##  ## ##     ## ##       ##       ####
##  ##  ## ##     ## ##       ##       ####
##  ##  ## ######### ######   ######    ##
##  ##  ## ##     ## ##       ##
##  ##  ## ##     ## ##       ##       ####
 ###  ###  ##     ## ######## ######## ####

Macworld explains how to force Lion to let you repeat characters: Open Terminal, paste the following code and hit enter.

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Then log out and back into your computer.

This concludes the only useful post Slacktory will ever publish.