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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

True, but the touchbar is much better at that specific role. It also opens up different forms of interaction for other applications.

The terminal, for instance, has an instant man page key. This is kind of cool. A tiling window manager could have window management special keys. I have a very nice keyboard on my desk at home with, a glorious Unicomp PC122 with 24 function keys. I love it, but I need to confess I never used that many function keys. Ever.

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The touchbar is worse imo. The problem is the lack of tactile feedback, plus unwanted "keypresses" when your fingers wander over it.

If they would have just placed the touchbar above the old row of ESC and Function keys, it could have been good. Now it is just shit.

It's a mystery to me why they didn't do this, at least on the 15" Macbook. Instead they made the already-plenty-big-enough touchpad even larger. A secondary screen / input control above the full keyboard would be awesome. It'd be a great way to get notifications (tests passed, build finished, sports scores, whatever...) or have ad-hoc controls.

RE: Lack of haptic feedback - There's an app for that - https://www.haptictouchbar.com/ It's not great (that the feedback is in the touchpad and not the touchbar is disconcerting), but it's better than no feedback.

> The terminal, for instance, has an instant man page key.

So, F1 on Windows basically?

It seems to me that a lot of advantages mentioned by folks on the touchbar are born of Apple’s refusal to actually use the Fn keys as shortcut keys, unlike on Windows.

Not quite, because F1 meaning help is entirely a convention. Much like :q! is quit or C-x C-f is open file and Meta is the alt/option key.

That's one of the reasons I use the F-keys on the PC122 so little - it's hard to remember what I made them do.

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