Hacker News Reader

Comment by blueish | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to see if they decide to go back to it. Knowing Apple, they will most likely keep the touch bar, but it might be the case that they decide to add it back after the backlash the touch bar has received.

View on HN

How many people complaining about the missing escape key have actually used a touch bar computer, though? I've seen precious few examples of someone saying "I bought that MacBook, and have used it for some time, and I still want a physical escape key". I'm not saying these people don't exist, I'm just saying that I think nearly all of the naysayers are people who haven't actually bought the computer.

I have. Fired up the terminal and started Vim. 5 minutes later I was convinced that my next computer will probably come with Windows. Really sad, too. I don't have to blow away the OS to get a decent experience on a Mac.

I am no longer a Mac user, but might I suggest remapping the escape key to another, it really saves a ton of time. Personally I use "hh", which makes some vim users cringe, but let me tell you, it's so much faster than escape.

Caps lock seems like an obvious one, no? It's on the home row and I've never used it in my entire typing life (apart from to turn it off if I turn it on by accident).

I always map Caps Lock to Control. It's pretty darn useful that way. In Vim I remap "jk" to escape.

Oh no. We're not going there. My hands are not so small, and I've got the rattlesnake-like "hit esc" action down. Thinking about the command keys again sounds like a great way to discard all of my productivity for about three weeks.

Fair enough, but I've heard similar reasoning espoused from other vim users who were reluctant to transition away from arrow keys. Perhaps you might find the productivity dip worth it in the long run, but I am not unsympathetic to the cost of shaking the routine up.

In .vimrc:

    no <Right> $
    no <Left> ^
    no <Up> <C-U>
    no <Down> <C-D>

That should be enough to help newbies to stop using the arrow keys and put their right hands on hjkl as the Gods intended.

I can vouch for this. It's much faster for me to hit "jk" (my preferred mapping for escape) than it is to hit the Escape key. And given how frequently you need Escape in Vim, the time adds up really fast. It's also just a lot more comfortable, because my hands can remain on the home row.

I've had problems remapping basic functionality keys in the past. I switched ':' and ';' for instance, it works great in vim when my profile is loaded but leads to a lot of mistakes in other environments, either machines or one of the million emulators.

In your .vimrc file:

    ino kj <Esc>

Then type kj each time you need to exit insert mode instead of escape. You'll love it. It's much better for your hands.

I know at least two people. Me and a friend of mine. Both of us bought the 15" touch bar MBP and later returned it.

- there were some issue with the keyboard on both of our MBP

I exchanged it for a non touch bar MBP instead. He exchanged it for an old 2016 MBP.

The touch screen should be where the trackpad is, and modal. Your hand is already there, you have multiple degrees of freedom (not just left-right) and apple would finally have a logical place to put the mobile experience it so desperately wishes to bring to the desktop.

Put your iphone on your touchpad for a demo.

The touch id should be down there too.

I can't remember where, but I read an interesting piece pleading with apple to bring the 17" macbook pro back. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. The extra headroom for the keyboard means they can easily cozy the touch bar in above the normal function keys. The extra chassis means they can put a bigger battery in there. The extra screen size would be... well it would be awesome.

But that's all a bunch of dreamy tech fluff. Apple has it's sights set squarely on a customer that most certainly isn't using the product for professional purposes.

Yeah, 17" is pretty much a prerequisite for me as far as laptops go. I was in the market for a laptop a few years back and considered the MBP but I ended up going with the 17" Asus Zenbook and have been very pleased with it. I'll admit that the MBP has a bit better build quality, but I'd say the Zenbook is 90% there but much cheaper, much better specs, and of course I got my 17" display.

It was only later I discovered that the newer MBPs don't play nicely with Linux, so I dodged a bullet there.

The problem that I have with most 17" laptops is the stupid number pad. It forces me to type with my hands off-center from the screen, and it drives me insane. The old 17" macbook pro was basically the only one to do it right.

Yeah, I'm not a numpad user myself, but I never really noticed the hands off-center issue, my brain seems to adapt without much distraction.

It's not my brain that's the problem. It's my shoulders. I tend to want to view the screen dead-on, so I'm typing with my hands shifted a few inches to the left. For a few minutes that's no big deal. Get into a 3-hour coding bender and my shoulders are killing me once I unfold.

Which model is the 17" ZenBook? A quick search came back empty.

There's enough room to have the function keys and touch bar now... the way they should have done it to begin with.

My bet is that they were worried that no one would find a use for the touch bar if it didn't replace an existing function

Apple could shrink the touchbar enough to have space for the esc key. They could have also included a single classic USB type A receptacle and kept the magsafe power connector... so who knows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com