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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

The Touch Bar is one of the most annoying things added to a laptop that I never asked for. To top it all off you have to pay for the privilege. My main complaints are that I'm accidentally hitting something on it which disrupts my workflow.

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I've forgiven Apple for many small issues over the years but the touch bar is simply unforgivable. Beyond cost it is simply poor design. Keyboards are not meant to be looked at.

It should have been an extra row and not an instead row.

No, that would still suck - but at least I guess you could disable it.

I thought the worst thing about touchbar would be "no feedback on the ESC key". That's bad, but boy was I wrong. Turns out that the far worse thing for me is that I rest my left hand slightly above the number row. With touchbar, any touch, no matter how light, will trigger random stuff (very often, repeated "esc" keypresses, with the predictable disrupting effects)

Are you me, cause this just happened repeatedly this morning and I’m furious.

i'm sure it would still suck for a lot of people but all i was saying is that if they wanted to change the product it should have been an addition of the bar as an enhancement instead of the swap out of a beloved row of keys.

Try HapticKey - it manipulates the Force Touch feature to provide haptic feedback when pressing the Touch Bar keys.

https://github.com/niw/HapticKey

How haptic feedback is not a general feature of this, is beyond me. How the Touch Bar is no longer an 'option' if you want a new MBP is also beyond me.

Heck, Apple's been beyond me for some time. There are so many decisions I just don't understand.

I specifically tend to hit the Siri button. However apparently there are multiple ways one might disable it as well as the entire touch bar: http://osxdaily.com/2018/08/30/disable-touch-bar-macbook-pro...

My colleague accidentally touches the wrong part of his touch bar, and exits our weekly meeting every single time.

It would be better if you had a lot more control to customize it, especially doing things like adding buttons that open links or run scripts.

In any case though I likely still would not use it much. My Pro spends most of it's time with an external keyboard, track pad, and monitor plugged into it.

It would be better if you could simply entirely permanently disable it so that it was exactly like a keyboard with conventional F keys. But goodness forbid Apple let anyone who lives day in and day out with a huge suite of software that extensively uses F keys make that choice.

Or, heck, let us opt out at purchase time, and of the TouchID too. No way I will ever use this.

> It would be better if you could simply entirely permanently disable it so that it was exactly like a keyboard with conventional F keys.

But you can do this in System Preferences?

No. You can do it for some applications, one at a time, but not all, and upgrades sometimes don't remember the settings. Wine apps and other nonstandard apps cannot be added at all. Really sucks.

It's unpleasant, but it's possible to remap keys so that your apps still work with physical keys. For example, I remapped Alt+F7 to Alt+Shift+7 in Intellij (it's a shortcut from GNOME keymap).

I used to hate Touchbar initially but later on got used it and especially sometimes useful[1] except the accidental Siri activation.

What I can't let go is the Keyboard sound !

[1] WebEx meeting, QuickTime, iTunes

Another workaround is to carry a BT keyboard with you.

Is this some kind of a joke? Are you serious?? The keyboard interface is one of the two main hardware components of a laptop, the other one being the display. If one of them isn't right, the logical thing would be to get another laptop, isn't it?

It really does say something about the design if you need an external keyboard with your laptop.

It's not a joke. I've seen real people doing this.

I did this for a while. Too annoying for the long term. But definitely a work around.

I don’t think it’s totally acceptable to have to carry an extra device because the company refuses to manufacture the product that we want.

If I have to carry an additional keyboard because I don't like the one on my laptop I'll just chose a different laptop.

You know you can edit what the Touch Bar shows, right? Customize it to be useful for you.

Can I edit it to have key edges?

Not nearly enough. More often than not, it’s customization makes for 2 taps instead of one, e.g. brightness and volume.

Both of these are one tap or one-tap drag for me.

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