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Comment by georgewfraser | Hacker News Reader

The touchbar is such an FU to developers. It still hasn't found any real use. They're not rolling it out to other models. Basically, it's a little fun "experiment" that they've imposed on all their PRO users, thus demonstrating they no longer really care about this user group.

Personally, I'm waiting for the next generation of Surface devices to come out, and I'm going to see if I can make WSL work for me.

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Apple could have added the touch bar on top of the function keys instead of replacing the function keys, and they would have avoided the entirety of the criticism. Nobody hates the touch bar, we just love the function keys.

This is how I feel about it. If the touch bar were above the top row of keys, it could still be useful for innovative things like video scrubbing, etc., but yet let other users move quickly with physical keys for day-to-day tasks.

Without an Escape key I'm doomed. The touchbar doesn't cut it.

I tried a 2017 model and could only adapt with the daggy workaround of remapping Caps Lock to Escape. Unfortunately that is therefore in the "wrong" location for muscle memory for every other keyboard I use.

Sadly I have such a strong preference for OSX that it seems I'll be using the limping 2012 Retina MBP on which I'm typing until it dies completely, and then probably switch to a (nonpro) MacBook.

I also remap caps lock to escape; for a button used so regularly, it just makes sense. Heck, who in their right mind is using caps lock more frequently than Escape!

Control is used even more than Escape. Control should replace caps lock, and escape should replace the control key.

With karabiner, you can make it so that tapping capslock is escape and hold is control. You can make shift-caps be toggle caps if you need it for some reason. You can make hold-enter another control (nifty, but adds a nearly perceptible lag to regular tap enter).

I don't have a good use for the old control key. Maybe another fn? Maybe a super (or hyper) key?

Now that I have a video demonstration, I feel obligated to post it any time I see someone complaining about the escape key. You can use escape on the touchbar by putting your finger in the exact same place as you would on any other keyboard. Escape didn't go anywhere.

Video proof: https://streamable.com/ao18b

It's a little misleading to call it "the exact same place as any other keyboard".

Here's[0] is my previous MBP. Pressing anywhere on the escape key will trigger a keypress. You don't have to be perfectly centred on it, and even having a finger half-off the left side will work.

Does that work for the non-visible bit of the touchbar?

And how do you know when you've actually pressed it, if the app doesn't immediately indicate it, and you're not looking down at the "button"?

[0] https://cnet4.cbsistatic.com/img/27By8ZzhyWJoIxipAsZsz3W0bj8...

> And how do you know when you've actually pressed it

Usually when I press a key I expect the application behavior to noticeably indicate that I've pressed something, regardless of what key I'm pressing. When do you press escape and not get actual behavior change, whether that change is to back out of a vim mode or to dismiss a dialog box?

Various tty applications will wait a short time after an escape to see if it was part of a esc-<key> meta combination.

In emacs esc-esc-esc is something I use relatively often.

It gets even worse over slow ssh to somewhere remote, when visual state updates could take up to several seconds.

On other keyboards I'd assume the tactile click of the key was a press, and could chain up extra inputs. Now I much more often have to pause to check I did in fact trigger the esc at the right point.

The other annoyance is the lack of touch force means even a slight overshoot on the number keys or ¬ will probably also trigger an escape, so I have to keep that it mind. It's much harder to do with a physical key because it takes more than brushing it with a fingertip when using the finger pad to press the targeted key.

Better haptics might make the touchbar a bit less obnoxious (and Better-Touch-Tool can already trigger the trackpad 'click' when a button is touched, but isn't ideal)

If Apple can implement 'force touch' on the trackpad, I suspect it could be possible on the bar as well, so it needs to be "pressed" rather than just "touched".

This red herring is exactly what doesn't work. It's not a key - there's nothing tactile.

The Dell XPS 13 Developer (Ubuntu) has treated me well.

"The touchbar is such an FU to developers."

No, it's not. Not every developer uses those keys.

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