Macbook Air Butterfly Keyboard Double Spacing Problem and Fix

I dont have a photo of my Macbook Air. Photo by Vijayasimha BR on Unsplash

As I type this, I have owned more than half a dozen Apple Products, with at least one new Apple purchase every year. Apple products and services are so essential to my work, I have to buy and use them even in the middle of money problems related to the pandemic.

All of the products and services from Apple are fantastic. I have been a windows user since I was 8 years old and a generally heavy tech user. Hence, I have a lot of references, and yes, Apple is the best of the bunch.

That is why, MacBook Air 2018, with its hoplessly awful Butterfly Keyboard and the camera from the early 2000s, is the worst product, Apple as ever made.

And, issues with this keyboard are

1. keys that repeat themselves
2. Slower typing experience because the design sucks.
3. Adding spaces, especially double spaces

I am touch typist, and all this seems to affect people like me who type at 70 to 90 words per minute. After much research, and special thanks to this link — How to Fix Repeat Let­ters and much experimentation, this morning, I (may) have finally solved this problem.

This screenshot, from System Preferences on my Macbook is here.

I hate you Butterfly Keyboard. You are the worst.

Two things helped me.

1. Key Repeat — off
2. Delay Until Repeat — Long

So, thats about it. Of course, this setting means, you cannot ‘press and hold’ for a continuous delete thing. Like when you want to erase an entire sentence, you would naturally press and hold delete. That will no longer work with the above setting.

As I said, butterfly keyboards suck.

Thankfully, Apple has swallowed it’s ego and the new Macbooks no longer come with the ‘innovative’ butterfly keyboards.

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