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Comment by l3xical | Hacker News Reader

The developers where I work who have new MBPs complain a lot about the keyboard, the lack of ports, the lack of an escape key, and the lack of an SD card slot.

I had a new MBP for a few months and hated it.

As soon as an old MBP freed up, I traded in for it. SO much happier, and my friends are jealous.

And I pretty much live in emacs. Where I use the escape key regularly. C-x ESC ESC is one of my go-tos.

YMMV.

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I'm pretty happy with mine. Ports were annoying until tech caught up (yubikey was awful until the usb-c version came out, for example).

My esc key has been caps-lock for the past like 6 years, so that isn't an issue. (HIGHLY recommend this either way)

I don't use the touchbar too much (just like I didn't use the f bar too much), but the sliding action for volume control and a few others is nice.

Exactly. The escape key has never been an issue for me either (for what it's worth, I use Spacemacs as my primary editor).

I just open the macOS preferences, and remap Caps Lock to Control. Then escape becomes a Caps Lock + [ combination. Simple, and no fumbling around for an Escape key.

This also works well on both macOS and Linux, especially when moving about the command line (e.g. Ctrl+A / Ctrl+E to move to the beginning/end of the current line, respectively). See [1] for more shortcuts. Especially useful is Ctrl+K to cut text after the cursor, and then Ctrl+Y to paste it back.

Of course, the regular control key will do the same thing. But using Caps Lock as control reduces strain, at least for me. In fact, it's the first change I make on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

And on Ubuntu, gnome-tweak-tool makes it trivial to make Caps Lock and additional Control key (if you really need Caps Lock, you can also swap Caps Lock and Control).

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/keyboard-shortcuts-fo...

Oh, and the trackpad is too big, so I was always hitting it accidentally. (Or maybe my paws are too big.)

For me, the trackpad is the thing that got me to get rid of my MBP and replace it with a Pixelbook. I was getting false positive clicks all the time while typing, which would move the cursor and destroyed my productivity. And I was not hitting it accidentally - I contorted my hands into all sorts of strange positions and it still happened, I had people observe me while it occurred, etc. Happened on two different MBPs, but the tech support folks at my company couldn't make it happen. Must be something weird about my capacitive field. Much happier with the Pixelbook, especially since I can now run Android Studio on it along with other Linux apps.

FWIW you can do C-x M-: instead of C-x ESC ESC

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