Trading a touchbar escape key for Windows? As a Mac user that uses Vim, that touchbar escape seems easy to adapt to compared to adapting to an entirely different OS (and Windows at that!)
- Ctrl-shift-esc (opens the task manager in Windows), and
- Trying to close dialogs when I'm not sure which button is "go away".
CAPSLOCK -> CTRL LEFT CTRL -> ESC
It's not great, but it works. The last time I had to deal with a company who put the ESC key in a weird place was back in college where we have several of these HP Apollo/720 keyboards:
https://alum.wpi.edu/~tfraser/Machines/hpapollo720.jpg
:-)
What about your ctrl key? You could remap that to esc.
You can do both. Have it act as ctrl when held (for shortcuts) and as Esc when released on its own:
https://github.com/alols/xcape
I presume there is similar software for windows.
The key actually extends to the edge of the touchbar even though the graphic for it does not.
There's at least 2-3mm of dead space on the LHS of the bar.
Having said that, yes, Apple should allow individuals to, for example, always require the touch bar to provide an escape key (or any other key) on the far left (or anywhere else on the touch bar). The user should get to control what the touch bar does through an easy and powerful interface and API (so third parties can extend the capabilities). Can we even make touch bar keys act as new meta keys? That would rule! The benefit of the Apple approach is that even if this has not been done yet, it's all software: it could be done.
As far as Windows, I guess it must come down to which features are important to you, and personal taste. I use Windows a lot, and have owned a Surface Pro, and boy I hated it. The very, very best thing about Windows is the Linux compatibility layer, and even that's not as good as if it were a real Unix-like platform all the way down.
I am indeed glad you're happy with your laptop (seriously; not sarcasm), but I've been there, done that, and hated it.
I suffered the temporary pain of switching to OSX in '06 because I'm not religious about these things, and at that time macbooks running OSX were providing an exceptional environment for devs like me. It was a hard transition, but after a couple of months I was (mostly) fine. A fair amount has changed in the world in 12 years, and I'm no longer convinced that OSX inherently provides the best environment for a dev. I figured give windows a shot and see how it goes. It took me 24 hours to get the machine in a state where I could work as before (this would have been impossible on a windows box in 2006), and the question now becomes, why would I go back? It's only been a week, so perhaps windows will show me why very soon, but my gut feeling is it won't.
Also worth considering, is that from about 2000 onwards, apple was catering to open source focussed devs, at the exact moment that microsoft was making their lives impossible. I think that trend may have been reversed. Every upgrade to OSX for the past six years or so has represented more pain than pleasure for me. YMMV, but microsoft's offerings, even when flawed seem to be headed in the right direction.
As far as the comment, yeah, I was a little snarky I suppose, but a common response to complaints about the lack of an escape key is "you don't actually need one". I'm sorry, but I do. Ok, I don't need one. but I really want one, and this is a laptop we're talking about, and I use it as a laptop most of the time. I also want ports, a headphone jack, etc. But the escape key is for me the last straw, and enough of an incentive to actually look on the other side of the fence, which I've avoided doing for 12 years. I like what I see there.