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Comment by a2tech | Hacker News Reader

I think the TouchBar is here to stay. Non-programmers LOVE IT. Its crazy how many people come up and ask me about it at presentations. I was running a presentation the other day and had PowerPoint full screen and someone walked by and saw the mini slide previews and all the presenter controls on it and was absolutely blown away by it. They called over a few other people and they all left wanting a Mac.

For some its an irritation. For others its a revelation.

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Might be one of those "designed to look good and sell more units, not for actual users" Apple ideas. There was a post about it on HN a few weeks ago. Edit: linked below

Perhaps something like this? https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/

I'm a programmer and I love it too. It looks really nice and the virtual buttons that appear in the different applications that I also use are really convenient (e.g. the settings button for my VMware VMs or the full control I have over Spotify as I work somewhere completely different).

The escape key being "hard to hit" is exaggerated to say the least, and the F-keys I only use then I debug and need to step through my code. I do other things when developing than stepping through my code.

I have my caps-lock key mapped to esc and that solves that issue- a bigger issue for me is not having volume keys available all the time.

One better: I have my caps-lock key mapped to control, then use the ControlEscape "spoon"[1] for Hammerspoon[2] to allow it to also be an ESC key. The insight is that "control" is held, but "esc" is momentary, allowing these functions to be overlaid. It works great, nary a hiccup.

Way beyond "fixing" the Touch Bar's lack of ESC, this is far and away my preferred usage now.

[1] https://github.com/jasonrudolph/ControlEscape.spoon – a plugin (aka "spoon") for Hammerspoon.

[2] https://www.hammerspoon.org/ – a fantastic UI event scripting and customization tool for macOS

Yeah, Karabiner-Elements has that option and it's great. There is something satisfying about smashing that ESC button sometimes though in some contexts. :(

And then you go to use another machine with a full keyboard... Frustration. I agree: mapping keys is a simple and easy fix. But, it's frustrating if you switch between machines. I literally cannot type on my MBP from work after using my fantastic mechanical keyboard all day. Jarring is an understatement.

I want a full, physical keyboard. That's it. I won't buy another MacBook if Apple continues to forcefeed that pile of garbage as the only option. I said this in another comment a while ago: people who like Touchbar don't type. They're point and click users. People who type for a living despise it. I realize there are outliers but that's a pretty accurate characterization.

To be clear: what I've described is not a "fix" – it's an unalloyed improvement. I use this configuration uniformly across all keyboards: control and ESC on the home row FTW.

Also, take your angry generalizations about TouchBar users elsewhere. Aside from the ESC key loss I'm fine with the TouchBar, and know quite a few competent touch-typist developers who really like it as well. It is very divisive, but please leave off characterizing others' preferences according to your own frustration.

And I really do understand your frustration with the keyboards. They're just not great, and the reliability problems are a disaster. The only silver lining is that there's pretty reliable info that Apple is switching back to scissor mechanism keyboards for its laptops this year. Doesn't help the rest of us stuck with the "bad" years keyboards, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or even play/pause buttons

I did the same, plus used Karabiner to disable the Touch Bar escape "key" and set the touchbar to only show volume, brightness, kbd brightness regardless of app running.

In that mode it's OK, but I still have to look down to mute the sound, which is inconvenient.

In 3 years of work laptop use I don't think I've ever once encountered an app that actually provides useful enough controls to depose my default function controls of

1. Mission control 2. Brightness down 3. Brightness up 4. Previous track 5. Play/pause 6. Next track 7. Volume down 8. Volume up

After experimenting with all of the apps I use every day to see what controls they could provide, I ended up just disabling the app-specific touchbar controls entirely and going with my defaults for every app.

I know it's personal preference how everyone likes their own machine configured, but as someone who gets zero value out of the OLED display, it's frustrating how vastly worse an experience it is than than it needs to be. The touch bar is clumsy with its zero touch feedback, so that I'm always accidentally pressing it with my fingertips when using the number row, and it drives me crazy. It's so much worse than the function keys that even if they fixed the utterly broken keyboard mechanism I would never buy a touchbar Macbook. Fortunately, Apple is making it a really easy decision, since their display panels aren't even close to being the best anymore, their core components are perennially outdated and overpriced, and MacOS has long been neglected. What else is there? The touchpad? I just use a high-end gaming mouse because it's about a billion times more precise and reliable.

That sounds like Quicksilver from a long time ago, I wonder what took its place. I know Spotlight took a lot of the filesearch features, but the UI automation and macro functionality were some real powerful stuff.

I don't see what you're saying the connection is to Quicksilver, but I believe the modern replacements are Alfred and LaunchBar. I have licenses for both but ended up sticking with LaunchBar for my MacOS machines because I don't need the more powerful automation features of Alfred.

Alfred+Dash have been an amazing improvement to my workflow. Type in "torch batch" and suddenly you have all the docs for Pytorch's Batchnorm functions right there.

If you're accidentally pressing it when hitting the number keys, your finger positions must be way off. It's not like the number keys are thin at all. Regarding the gaming mouse, if all you use the touchpad for is point and click a mouse is a decent replacement - that goes for all touchpads. I'd like to see you do three-finger-right-swipe or four-finger-pinch on a gaming mouse, though. :P

I'm a programmer and I like the touch bar. Intellij integrates it quite nicely, I can add terminal commands if I'm in the terminal, switching between email and calendar in Outlook also works well.

Sure it also has downsides but generic "F1" to "F12" buttons also isn't the pinnacle of UX.

I think it’s here to stay, too, and thankfully the main issue with it is fixable: the lack of tactile feedforward/feedback. If the display had little grooves to separate the controls and used the same 100% convincing fake button travel used in the trackpad, I think it would be an excellent enhanced fn key row. You need to be able to rest your finger lightly on a key without pressing it. (The same needs to happen with smartphones/tablets too, fwiw)

You’re making big assumptions about programmers. I’d rather have the touch bar and I’m a programmer. One of the reasons is that, well, it’s programmable.

What tool do you prefer to program it?

BetterTouchTool

They should have both a function key row and a touchbar then.

It has value, it doesnt have enough value to remove an entire row of keys that have been of use for decades.

I love the TouchBar as well - it would be perfect from my perspective if they had kept the Escape key.

That is literally my only gripe with it

There’s tools out there like BetterTouchTool and I imagine several others than allow you to do this and more.

BTT cannot add a physical Escape key.

Since it seems like we’re already near tongue-in-cheek but still functional: it doesn’t need to; there’s a perfectly good oversized one sitting at the left end of the home row. If you’d like, you can even make it both Escape (by itself) and Control (when used in combination with another key).

I would like you to be able to buy a laptop with the TouchBar. However, I would like to be able to buy a laptop without one.

I wish Apple sold MBPs without a touchbar just so I could stop hearing about it in every single thread.

You’re in a thread about Apple keyboards. However, I am confident you could find a thread elsewhere that isn’t discussing TouchBars.

This one perhaps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20531955

I think it is mainly an irritation for "power users". Can't imagine the average person using function keys or caring that they are gone, they just use the GUI to do everything. The touchbar is great for those people because it takes options that they might normally have to use multiple clicks to get to, and puts them on the keyboard.

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