Your Mac has tons of features for customizing it just like you want it. With everything from Night Shift for easing eyestrain to hiding the Dock when it’s in your way, Apple wants to make sure that you enjoy your macOS experience.
But unless you spend a good amount of time getting cozy with your System Preferences, there may be settings you don’t even know exist. And some of those settings can speed up the work you do on your Mac.
Here, we’re going to show you a simple tweak that will make your Mac feel faster and it’s in your keyboard settings.
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Speed up your Mac keyboard
You’ll first need to open up your keyboard settings. So, click Apple icon >System Preferences from the menu bar or hit the System Preferences button in your Dock.
Now choose Keyboard and click Keyboard at the top of the window if necessary.

The first settings you’ll see are for Key Repeat and Delay Until Repeat. But do you know what these settings actually do?
- Key Repeat: How fast a key repeats when you hold it down.
- Delay Until Repeat: How long you must hold down a key before it starts to repeat.
These may or may not be actions that you use often or even realize you’re using. But if these are set to the left on the sliders, it means they’re moving slowly.
Consider this, you’re composing a document in Pages and hold down your Return key to jump to the bottom or even the next page. Or how about this, you hold down the Delete key to remove an entire section of an email quickly.
These are both situations where Key Repeat and Delay Until Repeat can move must faster than they probably do, right?
If you move the slider for Key Repeat to Fast as far as it will go and then move the slider for Delay Until Repeat to Short as far as it will go too, your keyboard will feel much faster when performing those repeat actions. Guaranteed!

What would you like to move faster on your Mac?
Hopefully this tip for making your Mac feel faster is one that you’ll find useful. And if you are wondering how to speed up other actions on your Mac, let us know in the comments below so we can try to help!
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Sandy worked for many years in the IT industry as a project manager, department manager, and PMO Lead. She then decided to follow her dream and now writes about technology full-time. Sandy holds a Bachelors of Science in Information Technology.
She loves technology– specifically – terrific games and apps for iOS, software that makes your life easier, and productivity tools that you can use every day, in both work and home environments.
Her articles have regularly been featured at MakeUseOf, iDownloadBlog and many other leading tech publications.
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