Comment by bmurphy1976 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmurphy1976 | Hacker News Reader

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> The new keyboard. The ergonomics are fine, but I am hard on keyboards and nevertheless expect 5+ years of duty (my last machine was bought new in 2013, and just wasn't cutting it with 8G of RAM). I can't have an unreliable and expensive keyboard.

I just don't get it. I've had my MPB with the new keyboard for 9 months now and I hate it more than ever. The ergonomics are absolutely terrible, the layout (particularly the arrow keys is terrible) the feedback is terrible, the fragility is terrible, the touchbar is terrible.

9 months and I still can't type for shit on this keyboard. This is coming from somebody who can type over 100 WPM with 98% accuracy. On a normal keyboard, when warmed up, I can correct many mistakes without even looking at the keyboard OR the monitor. I just know I made a mistake and my fingers know what to do to fix it (a side-effect of having done dictation and typing out handwritten papers/notes professionally for a couple years).

They keyboard is objective crap. It's past time for it to go, or at least give us an option.

Personally, I have an older wired Apple "chiclet" keyboard (short-throw, not long) and I can hit ~120 WPM on it- which is way above the 90 WPM max I get on a clicky mechanical keyboard (Cherry Blue / Green / Red).

I don't like their new keyboards, and I have a Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard which I love to use, too, but Apple's slightly older keyboards have a spot in my heart.

I just switched to the Apple keyboard at work from my CODE keyboard (too loud in conference calls and I always forget to unmute) and I was shocked to find I’m faster on the Apple keyboard, even without any time to get used to it.

The MBP keyboard is still a POS though.

Soon after buying a 2016 Macbook Pro quicly I learned from personal experience how fragile thekeyboards were. Ater it was repaired under warranty I quickly sold it and bought two maxed out 2015 MacBook Pros hoping they would last until Apple got around to fixing the keyboard. It looks like my bet will be rewarded.

Also contributing to my decision is that the Touch Bar did not work for me at all. I have less than perfect eyesight. I need keys with tactile feedback and that don't move around to be sure I'm sure I'm accurately hitting the right key.

I do still have a non-touchbar 13 inch 2017 MacBook Pro that I use from time to time. I move around a lot and work in many locations. I've cursed Apple many times when suddenly needing to connect to an older USB or HDMI device but not having my dongle collection with me this time... The need to carry dongles seems like a kludge that detracts from the elegrant compactness the computer itself.

I’m only two months in having been clinging to my 2015 MBP until recently forced to upgrade by my company. Now I feel borderline incompetent at times when I can’t hit the arrow keys or escape smoothly. One solution is to use an external keyboard, but then I won’t adapt to the new feel and I’ll be stuck like this forever, unable to type competently in a meeting or any other time I’m away from my desk.

I could probably get used to the feel of the latest butterfly keys, but the arrow keys and virtual escape key and to a lesser extent virtual F-keys are intolerable. It’s like has Jony Ive ever had to type something? Hell no, he has people to do that for him, the important thing is everything he touches look immaculate in a 90-degree closeup and framed above his mantel.

You should make the caps lock key your escape key, that's what I do. It's vastly superior to the touchbar escape key. In fact, I even prefer it to a regular escape key at this point, although my muscle memory does cause problems when I use somebody else's computer.

I removed the escape key from my touchbar entirely because I kept accidentally brushing it when I went to type ` or ~. I also had the lock screen widget on the touchbar for a couple months, but I removed that because again I kept accidentally brushing that and locking my laptop when I meant to hit delete.

I think you are right, Ivy probably never really used the keyboard. He probably has a desk both at home and at work with the magic keyboard and that keyboard is decent enough. The couple hours he spends on the plane travelling between Cupertino and London isn't enough time for him to build up empathy for what the rest of us have to go through.

Already use it for Ctrl in the UNIX tradition, and it's really hard to change that muscle memory.

If you get a Japanese layout keyboard, you get a bunch of extra free keys which you use for whatever you want. https://i.imgur.com/tuCklIJ.jpg

Particularly handy are the extra thumb keys (I use the one to the right of the spacebar for backwards delete, but vim users could put escape there.). Also control is in the right place and caps lock is in the hard-to-reach corner, where it should be.

One especially nice approach is to re-map all of the right-hand letter keys one position over to the right, spreading the hands apart, making right enter and shift more accessible, and leaving an extra column of easily accessible index-finger keys in the middle of the keyboard.

Oof, the vertical return key on the UK keyboard almost made me tear my hair out when I did a 3-year stint in London :)

If you shift the right hand over to the right by one key, then return will be in the same position relative to your hand as on a US-ANSI keyboard. You then only need to find an appropriate key to use for the right bracket and backslash, but there are plenty of good choices.

I have caps lock mapped to Ctrl and Ctrl mapped to Esc. Seems to work pretty well.

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