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Comment by geophile | Hacker News Reader

How does a programmer evaluate this machine without discussing at least one of vi and emacs, and the absence of real Esc and Fn keys?

By the way, I visited an Apple store and played with the new 15" MBP. It's even worse than I thought. I downloaded the latest Gnu Emacs, and the Fn virtual keys were not available. And in no case did I see the Esc and Fn virtual keys present at the same time.

Also ridiculous is the fact that the touch bar is not available on any keyboard other than the built-in MBP keyboard. So you now have to choose between the features of the touch bar and the comfort of external peripherals.

It is astonishing how many bad decisions were packed into this one revision of a formerly great machine.

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>If you need access to function keys (F1–F12), hold down the Function (fn) key at the bottom-left of your keyboard. Touch Bar changes to show the function buttons for you to select, and then it returns to its previous state when you release the Function key.

From https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204436.

Which is exactly how it works by default on old MacBook pros, since almost all the function keys were overwritten to control functions by default.

It appears you can't opt into it permanently? I'd be interested in finding out if you can just set it to always show function keys.

Even better: you can configure it per application in the foreground.

That's great.

I have my MBP (with real function keys) set up to not require than I press the Fn key to operate them. Pressing Fn to access the function key is an undesirable workaround.

Can you not do that with the new macbook? I figured you'd be able to do this context-dependent, so that they'd be function keys for relevant programs.

You definitely can, geophile is just being obtuse.

>For some apps, you can make the function keys display permanently in Touch Bar: In System Preferences, choose Keyboard. Click Shortcuts. From the left sidebar, select Function Keys. Click the “+” symbol, then navigate to the app and select it.

From: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207240

If you want always function keys, you can do that too:

>If you prefer the top row of keys to always behave as standard function keys without holding the Fn key: Choose System Preferences from the Apple menu. Click Keyboard. Click the Keyboard tab if it's not already highlighted. Select "Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys"

From: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204436

I actually looked through System Preferences. I did not see a new Touch Bar option, and it didn't occur to me that a non-keyboard device would be configured under Keyboard. My bad. While this does improve things, I would still rather have real keys. Tactile feedback is a thing.

Note: the second link only applies to non-Touch Bar devices.

Not every programmer cares about vi and emacs.

Only something like 1/3

Everyone on Mac that actually produces software for macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS.

Did you not read the article? That was addressed directly.

>>How does a programmer evaluate this machine without discussing at least one of vi and emacs, and the absence of real Esc and Fn keys?

What percentage of programmers use vi or emacs?

Use or say they use? vi and emacs are alot like some programming books people say they have read to show they are a programmer because they think that it what it means. My guess, < 10% with all the IDEs and text editors out there today. On servers or VMs they are common, in actually coding, probably overstated.

Admit I use nano whenever editing through ssh, fake escape key was still the first thought through my mind when I saw that though. They at least have a little braille bump where escape is supposed to be? (if not new accessory opportunity? can i get a design patent on that?)

My laptop's top left corner of keyboard recently stopped working (new one shipped), and well, I've only then realized how much I use vim. I don't use it for programming, but well, it's the text editor I use the most for config files. I had to install a virtual keyboard (onboard) just to be able to press esc. So, while no esc isn't be a reason to not buy the new mbp for me (price, lack of magsafe and the dongle madness are the reasons I don't buy, though), it is still be very, very annoying.

intellij has a vi mode that doesn't suck

Mac users are poseurs, got it.

Quite a lot. If you are doing anything on remote servers it's likely to be the only text editor. But I guarantee you that 99.999% of them only know (and need to know) the basics e.g. saving file, search, find/replace etc.

I would say maybe 1% of developers actually use them as an IDE given how poor they are compared to something like IntelliJ or Visual Studio.

1% is WWWAAAYYY too low. The stack overflow survey in a sibling comment had 30%. Some of us don't love all the baggage that comes with a full IDE.

I would bet that it's really in the single digit range. I think lots of programmers dishonestly claim to use it because its some sort of badge of honor to say you do.

Is more from old habits than a badge of honor. Fewer new developers use emacs or vi for coding. But I think "single digits" is too low too. I've been to talks by Microsoft engineers where they code using vi or emacs. One of the reasons is that the IDEs are always a step behind the languages.

> One of the reasons is that the IDEs are always a step behind the languages.

Depends on the language, some of them are IDE friendly, e.g. Java, C#, Eiffel, VB, Delphi, C++ Builder,

A lot of developers who use IDEs Ike Visual Studio also use VI style bindings with modal development styles within those IDEs.

When Visual Studio Code came out, the VIM extension was one of the most sought after.

I see vim or emacs used in just about every programmer meetup or dev on-site I visit. Every single one. And the numbers are much, much higher than 1%.

If you get used to editing vim or the extreme ease of laying out windows on the fly, jumping between window configurations and saving UIs in emacs, then even IntelliJ seems quite old-fashioned. I've tried 3 times to switch to CLion by JetBrains and every time I immediately miss all the ways emacs has streamlined my development life. (I use emacs with vim-emulation)

Vim keyboard macros (supported in emacs), the use of the "." key for all kinds of editing magic, and other things are extreme improvements over old-school editing that most "modern" editors use. The makers of VS Studio seem to think that a better autocompletion is going to improve the lives of developers, and other similar cockpit-like features. It's just basic text editing prowess that actually improves their lives, and that is where vim and emacs shine.

I'm not a hater, but emacs with vim-emulation. I've now seen everything :D

Evil mode is its name, and it is very popular. Best of both worlds.

Something around 30℅ https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tec...

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