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Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

I am a developer. The Touch Bar is useless to me. I remapped Caps lock to Esc expecting to be annoyed, but still hit Esc nonetheless because it works. And I deftly adjust volume using the Touch Bar slider using press-and-slide (not tap then pick-and-slide), relying on the += key for tactile positioning (but the position itself is largely muscle memory by now)

I am also a musician. The Touch Bar is fantastic to adjust tuneables in GarageBand, without the gorilla arm or wobbly screen effect you get on touchscreens.

If it were annoying to me I'd just remap the two or three functions I use as a developer to some keyboard shortcut. After all I'm a developer, I think I can handle that fairly swiftly by myself if no tool were available (and I'm fairly convinced there is).

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> The Touch Bar is fantastic to adjust tuneables in GarageBand, without the gorilla arm or wobbly screen effect you get on touchscreens.

I futzed around with the touch bar in Logic when I got one and wrote it off almost immediately. Logic Remote (which works with GarageBand, AFAIK) already exists and works with an iPad. Clear labels, clear text, manipulating multiple elements easily at once--it's a better solution than what they tried to wedge in with the touch bar.

The bigger problem with the touch bar is that, as a developer, I end up hitting the touch bar controls all the time. VSCode "helpfully" has previous tab/next tab buttons on it--and so when I try to hit 2 or 3 on the keyboard, sometimes I brush against them and suddenly I'm disoriented and typing in a completely different tab.

This machine is a work laptop. (Typically my music stuff is done on a 2012 rMBP, which is why I already had Logic and Logic Remote set up.) When I started, I asked for a half-the-price Thinkpad on which to run FC30 and was denied because "everyone else uses a Mac." I love the job but between the garbage touchbar and the hand-wreckingly shallow keyboard travel the computer they gave me it's easily the worst part of my day.

If you work at fixed locations most of the time, is getting real (i.e. external) keyboards an option?

My preferred external keyboard only has a PC layout. Having my fingers confused by having none of my shortcuts work is a bummer.

The real answer for me is going to be swapping for an X1 Yoga or an X1 Extreme, I think.

I have “recycled “ Dell keyboards for both home and work macs. The window keys map to command.

Maybe there are some shortcuts / combos I’m not aware of???

The modifier keys are out of place. Which can be fixed with Karabiner. What can't be fixed is mapping every keyboard shortcut to things that make sense to my hands with that keyboard. It isn't practical to rebind everything off of Command to Control even where it's possible, for example.

I'm a keyboard-based person, though I don't use tiling window managers or the like. I've got a system (he said half-ironically). Some shortcuts are more comfortable to do with my left hand on the modifier. Some, the right. All of them are hosed on a Mac and fixing them would take longer than what I did today, which is ask my boss to let me give the Mac to the new guy and go order myself an X1. So this story has a happy ending!

> Logic Remote (which works with GarageBand, AFAIK) already exists and works with an iPad. Clear labels, clear text, manipulating multiple elements easily at once--it's a better solution than what they tried to wedge in with the touch bar.

This suggests a fun and interesting way forward for Apple UI design - layered augments from additional devices. Let OS X be the core of the system, but enable big apps like Logic or Photoshop to have connected supplementary UI's in iPad or VR/AR that provide a high-quality interface to some specific functionality. Reduce alt-tabbing on the main screen.

I agree, and a lot of what I do for fun (live video production) is kinda exactly that. Not iOS- or Mac-specific, but I've got multiple iPads talking to vMix at all times.

> hand-wreckingly shallow keyboard travel

Now, I don't disagree with your sentiment, touch bar is definitely a nuisance without any superior use case over the buttons that were there before... But why do you think this keyboard wrecks hands? It is definitely the fastest keyboard I've typed on, and shallow keyboards are definitely inherently easier on the hands by any metric I can think of

I'm a keyboard pounder; it's just the way I've always typed. The best laptop keyboard I've found is the Alienware 13/15. The next best are any of the standard-travel Lenovos.

1mm travel keys just leave me thumping my fingertips off the laptop chassis all the time. It hurts.

There is Karabiner Elements (https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements) which is amazing!

Hammerspoon is also good https://www.hammerspoon.org/

... but both pale in comparison to the mighty AHK for Windows, imho https://www.autohotkey.com/

AHK is so incredibly useful it should be bundled with Windows at this stage

> Touch Bar is useless to me.

I don't get it, the rest of your comment is mostly positive?

I read it as useless to me as a developer, but useful to me as a musician.

"as a developer"; and "useless" in the literal sense: it could be the Touch Bar or anything else, I could care less because I don't use that part of the keyboard.

Even if it were annoying for the non-development functions I use it for when developing (volume control is not exactly "development", only auxiliary at best) I'd just remap them to actual keyboard shortcuts.

But it's not.

What's "annoying" is apps that could make it useful but put nonsense actions in there because horror vacui, not making use of its potential; but it's only so in an intellectual way, pragmatically I just ignore the Touch Bar in such cases and use the app as if I had if there was none.

The sentence "The Touch Bar is useless to me" is the only negative sentiment in the paragraph (if not the entire comment), and it's followed by a few positive examples.

Interesting, I use Logic and have never, once, used the touchbar or thought of a use case for it. I use a keyboard usb-midi with simple pitch bend, sustain, tone wheel, etc controls. If I need to adjust a knob on a virtual control I simply use the mouse just like I’ve always done. The only thing I use the keyboard for is shortcuts like split/join tracks, solo, mute/unmute, new/dupe track. I don’t even need to look at the Mac keyboard because Apple has kept these consistent in Logic for years (which I expect).

Unless I’m missing something I can’t think of anything the touchbar could do better for me. (just my 2c anecdote)

As a developer, the thing that excites me the most about the Touch Bar is the fact that there's a dedicated Xcode "pause" button on it when you're debugging an app in Xcode. If I were developing a macOS app that would finally be a great way of pausing in the middle of a mouse gesture or keyboard chord. But since I'm doing iOS development these days I don't actually end up using it, oh well.

That pause button is usually a function key in other keyboards.

Having it be a physical key, no matter what, can screw with trying to debug key chords in an app.

And Xcode doesn't use a function key to pause, since that would also interfere with any apps that use function keys. The default keyboard shortcut for pausing in Xcode is ⌃⌘Y, and I think you have to bring Xcode to the foreground for that to work anyway.

There's nothing stopping you from just remapping a regular key. You don't need a Touch Bar to get a "pause" button for XCode.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20395158

If you don't need to remap Esc, try remapping CTRL to CAPS. Helps a lot with dev work esp if you use mod keys frequently.

> I am a developer.

Ill bet you 99% of mac sales are NOT to developers.

Despite them arguably wanting to court developers to write swift programs, their hardware sales team doesnt seem to care about developer prosumers.

Yeah but 99% of Apple hardware sales are dependent on Mac developers.

Yea this is one of Apple's largest advantages as a platform, they really don't want the Macbook to fall out of favor as the developer's machine of choice.

People dont use osx/ios because developers like the hardware. Developers develop for osx/ios because apple provides them a toolkit and lots of potential customers, and exposure through the appstore.

I've been working in Silicon Valley at tech companies for the past 15 years, and MacBook Pros have been massively dominant for the web developers, server-side developers, database developers, technical developers, and mobile developers on not only iOS but Android. None of this can be explained by "Apple provides them a toolkit and exposure." I am pretty confident that developers use OS X because, yes, they like the hardware. (Which makes developers by and large not liking the last few years of MacBook hardware a danger Apple's been too slow to recognize.)

Yes, but also, it was basically linux, which meant that it was close enough to the hosts that you were connecting to. It was a nightmare to admin Linux from Windows in the past.

I have a college aged brother, and Microsoft currently owns GitHub, and is providing the linux subsystem, which is a huge signal that "developers are welcome." His whole generation is developing on $300 Dell laptops and it's easy. Mac used to provide that, but you paid for it.

Microsoft's moves to become more developer (and Linux) friendly are undoubtedly paying off. It's my understanding from recent data -- although I can't find a linkable reference at the moment -- that Apple laptops are still the #1 choice on college campuses by a substantial margin, but this could certainly be changing. (K-12 schools are full of Chromebooks, but anecdotally, that doesn't seem to be translating into a preference for sticking with them after high school.)

True, but there is a big difference in the quality of produced software between:

* I need to develop for this shitty platform, which I hate, because my customers are on it

* I want to develop for this awesome platform, because I just love it and my customers are also on it

If Apple loses touch & favor with developers, their platform will slowly but surely die out over a decade or two. Apple is expensive, the only reason for Apple to even exist is because they deliver quality products. If they ever go down the road of consistently failing this core value, they will die more quickly than reindeer thrown down a cliff.

That’s quite an assertion. I love (loved?) OS X and the hardware behind it. It’s the most polished unixy system money can buy. I don’t like the current generation of hardware, though.

Developer go where their users are. If that weren’t the case, no one would develop for consoles.

Right; that's why there are so many tools for Linux.

Which doesn’t help if you need to develop for the platform where the most money is - iOS

And Mac developers don't have to use MBPs to develop Mac applications. Use an iMac( Pro) or Mac Mini at your desk. Use a Macbook Air as a portable. Neither has a touchbar.

(Heck, technically, Mac developers don't even have to use Apple products to develop Mac applications. I've done native macOS app-dev and the only thing I have that runs macOS is a Hackintosh.)

Consider also this analogy: you don't develop console games on the console itself. You develop and build them on a computer using a cross-compiler, and then push them to a dev-kit unit to test them. Same thing applies here: just because you're writing macOS software, doesn't mean you need to be using macOS. You could stand up an office EXSi server running macOS VMs to serve as a CI server and test environment, and then actually write your macOS software in VSCode on Linux, pushing it over to the server to test it. People have done this. It's no harder than, say, developing for Android.

But developers are basically more picky office professionals. I hardly see why a device made for a developer would be poorly fitting or divergent to a business person or accountant. The developer hardly demands anything as niche as the Apple Pencil. The iPad, however (“what’s a computer?”)...

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