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Comment by jhaile | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with the touchbar is the escape key. I hate not having tactile feeling for a key I use on a regular basis. I'm constantly missing it or hitting something on accident.

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I've had Caps Lock mapped to escape for years. You used to need some tool to do this, but now you can do it right inside Keyboard settings "Modifier Keys".

Make sure you choose the real keyboard if you also have a Yubikey plugged in :)

I map caplocks to control, I find the default control button in a weird spot to always be moving my pinky to (and I hardly have a use for caplocks, like yourself). However, after you said this, it reminded me of the comment I caught once where someone had their caplocks setup to be esc on click, or control on hold... no idea how he had it setup, though I'm curious once again.

Karabiner Elements can do that.

> someone had their caplocks setup to be esc on click, or control on hold

I have this setup, and it is great. After you switch capslock to be Ctrl, just run (at startup):

    xcape -e 'Control_L=Escape'

This is the only problem I have with it too. I MUCH prefer having the Touch Bar. Even though I don't use it frequently, it comes in very handy for certain things, and I use it far more often than the function keys. Having a virtual escape key is just strange though. I wouldn't want to go back to a MacBook without a Touch Bar, but if they just cut out another button on the left like they have on the right for the power button and made it an escape key it would be perfect. As it is, the virtual escape key is actually pretty padded to the right. You could replace it with a hard key and not actually lose any space. You might actually gain a few usable pixels.

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