I’ve got a Mac Mini, which is my first Mac. Generally, I love it, but there’s one specific “feature” which is driving me mad.
OSX appears to be using quote marks as a modifier for the next character. For example, if I type:
then what happens is the two characters (one quote mark and one ‘u’) are replaced by this:
Other examples are ‘single quote + e’ producing é and ‘double quote + i’ producing ï.
OSX obviously has a setting somewhere that says “if the user types a quote mark followed by a character which can take an accent, then interpret this as a shortcut to produce the accented character.” This happens in all applications (it’s happening in this very text field as I type).
This would be really helpful if I typed a lot of accented characters, but I don’t. I do type a lot of text in quote marks, though. I’ve discovered that you can defeat the behaviour while typing by pressing the spacebar in-between the quote mark and the affected character, but I keep forgetting to do that. What I’d love to do is turn this behaviour off altogether.
I’ve been through the settings, and I can’t find a likely culprit. There’s a feature called “smart quotes and dashes”, but that’s not it. So I turn to the Dope!
For what it’s worth, I’m using an Apple Wireless Keyboard. Although I’m in the UK, I’ve got the keyboard set to “US International - PC” so that the buttons on the Apple keyboard produce the correct characters no the screen (I don’t have an option for US-Standard, which is making me wonder if it’s the international setting which is doing it). I’m on Yosemite 10.10.5.
That’s weird. It’s definitely not the default behaviour on OS X. Normally for accents you’d use the alt key as a modifier (ie. press alt-u followed by o to get ö).
Have you checked the Keyboard settings in System Preferences? Is there anything in the Text tab there which might account for this behaviour?
Actually it looks like this is the behaviour of the ‘U.S. International -PC’ Input source. Change it to British, or one of the other US input types and it should go away.
In 25 years using a Mac in the UK, I’ve never come across this problem before. So I had a little play around with my keyboard settings, and yes, it’s “US International - PC” that does it.
I’m on the same OS as you, and I have options of “U.S.” and “U.S. Extended” – do you not have those? Because they don’t seem to cause the same problem (neither does “British - PC”).
Yeah, it’s not a Mac thing, particularly. I first encountered it on our Win7 box (still not quite sure who turned it on, or whether they knew what they were doing)
“US-International” is the keyboard mapping that permits entering all the common European language accented characters using the plain old US physical keyboard which has none of them thar hi-falutin’ whatchamacallit dye-a-critics.
If that’s not your mission, don’t use that setting. But if you have to type French, German, or Spanish text using a US keyboard it’s a darn handy feature.
FYI on modern Mac OS X, if you don’t want repeating keys, you can simply hold down the key for which you want a diacritical mark. A little menu will pop up allowing you to select the right character.
I prefer repeating keys myself, and know that Alt-key combinations for everything I tend to use.
