OS X 10.7 Lion: Getting Rid of "Character Picker"

A new Lion feature taken over from iOS is the "Character Picker", which generates a popup menu of accented characters when you hold down the base letter on the keyboard. Some users detest this, as it stops the key repeat function which normally results when you hold down a key. To get rid of Character Picker, open Terminal and type

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

and then restart.

OS X 10.7 Lion Chinese Improvements

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/osx7.html

A bug: Bopomofo input is messed up when the candidate window is vertical. Switch to horizontal to get it to work right.

(Fixed in 10.7.2)

OS X 10.7 Lion Adds Major New Language Capabilities

New OS and App localizations: Arabic, Czech, Hungarian, and Turkish. These bring the total to 22.

New languages supported with both fonts and keyboards: Bangla, Georgian, Kannada, Khmer, Kurdish, Malayalam, Myanmar, Oriya, Sinhala, Telugu, Urdu. These have about 600 million speakers all together.

New languages/scripts supported with fonts only: Ethiopic/Amharic, Lao, Emoji

New languages supported via voices: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish. These must be downloaded separately.

New Spellcheckers: None

Other new features: Support for vertical text in TextEdit, access to accented characters via a pop-up dialogue when you hold down a character, improved Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese input methods, British English modules in Dictionary.app, support for Windows Indic fonts in TextEdit.