How to Type Accents on Mac

Press and hold or the Option keys: which is faster on a Mac?

Learning how to type accents on Mac starts with press and hold, then moves to the Option keys once you type accents every day. Apple's Mac User Guide (opens in a new tab) documents both and recommends the key combinations, which it calls dead keys, if you type accents often.

Press and hold needs nothing memorized. Hold a letter key and the accent menu opens with every accented form of that letter; click one, press the number under it, or move with the arrow keys and press Space.

The two differ in reach as much as in speed. Each Option accent key types only the letters listed against it in the table above, almost all of them vowels. The menu goes further: on our Mac the e menu also held ě, ẽ, ē, ė and ę, which no Option key types on the ABC layout.

A dead key is pressed and released before the letter, never held with it. That is the whole of how to type accents on Mac with keys: a mark, then a letter.

Press Option and E together, let go of both, then press E. While the mark waits, the Mac shows it highlighted, as in the first screenshot above. If the next key cannot carry the mark, you usually get the mark and the letter side by side; the measured table further down spells it out key by key.

How do you do accents on a Mac without memorizing the keys?

Let the Mac show you the keys instead of learning them. For doing accents on a Mac without memorizing anything, macOS has three built-in tools: the Keyboard Viewer, the Character Viewer and text replacement.

1. The Keyboard Viewer. Click the Input menu in the menu bar and choose Show Keyboard Viewer. If the menu is missing, turn on "Show Input menu in menu bar" in System Settings, Keyboard, Text Input, Edit. Hold Option and the keys show what they type; Apple's Keyboard Viewer guide (opens in a new tab) says an orange outline marks the accent keys.
2. The Character Viewer. Press Fn/Globe+E, or choose Edit, then Emoji & Symbols. Type a letter's name in the search field, such as latin small letter z with caron, and click ž. Apple's emoji and symbols guide (opens in a new tab) lists accented letters among what it finds.
3. Text replacement. In System Settings, Keyboard, click Text Replacements and add a pair such as cafe and café. From then on, typing the plain word in a supporting app swaps in the accented one. Apple's text replacement guide (opens in a new tab) warns that this is not available in every app.

Text replacement suits a handful of words you type every week, such as a name or a street. The Character Viewer suits the rare letter, such as ř, ş or ő. For a whole language, learn its two or three accent keys.

What should you check when accents on a Mac stop working?

When accents on a Mac stop working, the cause is usually the keyboard layout, the app or the letter itself, in that order. Check them one at a time, starting with the layout.

• The input source. The Option keys on this page belong to the ABC and U.S. layouts, and Apple's own example names the ABC layout. Another layout can put the accents on other keys. The Keyboard Viewer shows the active layout's keys, and the Input menu switches layouts.
• The app. Apple notes that accent marks are not available in all apps. Try the same keys in TextEdit; if they work there, the other app is the cause.
• The letter. Each of the Mac accent keys has a short list of letters, and the next table names every letter it refuses. For a letter outside the list, use the menu or the Character Viewer.
• The key order. Release Option before the letter. With Option still held, a letter key types a character from the Option layer instead: Option+S types ß.

Apple also suggests the ABC – Extended input source for typing in several Latin-script languages. Its accent keys are not in AccentPad's measured tables yet, so this page does not list them.