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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth do I need to tap twice to adjust the screen brightness? I couldn't find a way to just have two increase/decrease buttons. Why can't I adjust how long the touchbar stays active for? Why does it disappear at all? I can't imagine the touchbar would exist in its current form if Steve were alive.

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You don't need to tap twice. Put your finger down on the button and just drag; yeah your finger isn't actually touching the visible slider that opened up, but it work anyway, and the slider will collapse itself again automatically a second after you let go.

Turns out if you do a small rightwards/leftwards swipe on the brightness or volume buttons, then you can increase or decrease them by one notch without opening the slider.

It’s not an intuitive or discoverable command.

Yeah, but that's still two gestures instead of one.

You don't need to tap then swipe, just swipe.

Genuinely curious about the intuitive part: I found it intuitive because it’s a similar gesture in iOS (control centre). In addition, many other gestures on force touch trackpad such as peek-and-pop, are similar to iOS. I can carry my habit from iPhone to Mac without giving it much thought. In fact, to me it feels natural and expected behaviour after being used to the gestures in general. I don’t have a touchbar (still using 2015 rPro), and I agree about discoverability part — no way I’d have tried to swipe on a button.

So my question: once you discovered that you could do a swipe gesture, did you find yourself using it often?

Hey ravenstine, this was 1000% the same frustrations I had with brightness and volume.

The best fix for this for me (the sliding was still a pain) has been to customize the touchbar like this:

In keyboard settings:

1. Change "Touch Bar Shows" to "Expanded Control Strip"

2. Add the 3 button volume and the 2 button brightness controls.

This setup behaves the most like the functional keys for me and has been the best at alleviating frustrations.

I still hope Apple nukes the touch bar though, it's the worst aspect of the Macbook aside from the missing I/O ports.

My issue more is, if not looking and you press the wrong one (brightness/volume), you have to either wait for it to go away and try again or move your hand to clear it.

I feel that if you do the press and slide, the interface shouldn’t change to a slider (that needs to fade away).

FYI you can press and drag on the brightness/volume buttons to make adjustments immediately, no need for a second touch

I'm not complaining about the drag. I'm complaining that I have to tap once to open the slider and then drag it. Whereas it was easier just to have two buttons, one for increment, and one for decrement, that I could just tap or hold down.

Right - you don't have to let go and then grab the slider after it opens. You can just press and hold then slide left or right to move the slider immediately.

I guess there's a still tradeoff: this way you need to move your finger around, but you can immediately skip to exactly the level you want. With holding a button down you have to time it to get to the right spot instead.

Personally I like the slider better but that's just my opinion.

I understand why some people like the slider, but as someone who can type without looking, I'm used to being able to navigate with my fingers up to the brightness and volume controls without having to pay close attention. Now I have to look down in order to hit the right area of the touchbar.

I don't mind since it's barely below the bottom of the screen, but if you're in the middle of something it does mean taking your eyes off it.

If that bugs you enough to bother with a workaround, you could try something like this using HammerSpoon: https://gist.github.com/spinscale/fd82f00da29447990f27f36b3f...

Just put your finger on the icon and slide it one way or the other. You don't have to wait or tap more than once.

Edit for clarity: when you do this, your finger is not actually "on" the slider handle itself. The slider shows up in its usual place, which is offset from where your finger is. But the sliding still adjusts it.

It's a shame that this is not intuitive or discoverable. Its much more efficient but I had to have someone tell me about it.

I just tried what you said. That's slightly better, but it's overall a downgrade from having actual buttons. Thanks for the tip, though!

It sucks that it drags away my focus away from what I’m doing, and has me leave my typing position. Having a fun slider as a visual indicator when there already is a visual indicator on screen doesn’t make up for this inefficiency.

If you hold the brightness button on the Touch Bar you can slide your finger left and right to adjust the brightness so it’s one (long) press. Same with volume.

And if you don't want to wait for a long press, you can do one or more quick swipe to the left or the right, and it do the same as a press on the previous buttons.

There's a preference "Touch Bar Shows" -- change it to "Expanded Control Strip". That makes them work like the actual keys used to. I barely notice its a touchbar and not the old keys now (absurd of course, I'd prefer to have an actual choice).

You can touch and slide the finger to adjust brightness and volume.

I don't want to touch and then slide. I want to touch or hold once and either increment or decrement those properties. That was possible with the old keys. Now I have to tap and then perform an action, even though my touchbar has plenty of real-estate.

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