DevTips: Blazing fast cursor movement

Have you ever felt that moving your cursor in your editor is too slow? Well, the default key repeat settings on a new Mac OS is a bit slow for my taste. Here’s a quick animated gif to explain to you what I’m talking about. Compare the cursor movement speeds below:

Demonstration of slow cursor movement

Demonstration of fast cursor movement

You can make it faster by following these steps:

1. Go to System Preferences ❯ Keyboard and select the Keyboard tab
2. Set Key Repeat to Fast
3. Set Delay Until Repeat to Short

Screenshot of the Keyboard preferences window with the above settings applied

Or if you’re a power user and want to script the same using your dotfiles, you can do it via the command line using…

defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 1
defaults write NSGlobalDomain InitialKeyRepeat -int 10