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Comment by noncoml | Hacker News Reader

I don’t even mind the touchbar. Just give me back the Escape key!

I thought this was a joke as I haven’t used a recent Mac in a while but apparently it’s not. There really isn’t an escape key!

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207358

It's extra fun when touchbaragent hangs and you can't force quit anything

Personally, I just remapped capslock to esc, since I never use capslock. The touchbar does seem to hang more often nowadays, though. Especially when I'm trying to adjust the volume.

I remapped capslock to escape, which simultaneously gives me back a useful key and gets rid of a useless one :P

They are basically telling us "You can't escape our future"

Not a physical one, but the hit area on the TouchBar for Esc is actually larger than the physical key was. As much as people like to complain, in my experience the Esc key is extremely easy to hit.

And take the escape key off the TouchBar. I hit it all the time by accident. I really wanted to give the TouchBar a fair shake but after two months I still think it’s beyond useless.

I feel your pain, it's my number one problem with the Touch Bar, the second being that it's almost entirely useless in its default mode.

I have two solutions for you, though: firstly, download BetterTouchTool[1] and install the GoldenChaosBTT[2] preset. It's the killer app for the Touch Bar, it turns it into a genuinely useful feature that you'll find yourself using all the time, and BTT in general is an incredibly powerful tool for customising the way you interact with your Mac.

Secondly, switching Caps Lock to the Esc key[3] has been one of the biggest productivity improvements I've made in the last decade, seriously. I wish I'd done it sooner. I've made the switch on every machine I use, even the ones without a Touch Bar.

Hope that helps!

[1] https://folivora.ai

[2] https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-a-complete-t...

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/127591/using-caps-lock-a...

Thanks for the tip. I got BTT and now I only have brightness and volume sliders on the Touch Bar and no escape. Much better. Will probably do some customization but it’s already a big improvement.

And in the default configuration I often hit the Siri button when wanting to press Touch ID or (sometimes) backspace.

The TouchBar is nice on paper, actually adds to some applications, but the current implementation is a world of hurt.

At the minimum I’d like to be able to disable the touch bar. I only ever activate it accidentally and there is zero feedback. I never look at my keys. I really like the fingerprint scanner but it’s not worth the disruption in productivity.

At least that, and the idea of making the touchbar an actual tray is a great idea, would like this to be natively done and keep the screen as free as possible for the actual apps.

As long as it's optional, I could see people not liking this.

They removed the escape key? What the.....

I'm never going to retire my 2013 MBP at this rate.

It's very easy to remap caps lock to escape.

That's not the point. You shouldn't have to map caps lock to escape.

Why not, it's better anyway?

You are entitled to your opinion. Don't thrust it onto others.

Because caps lock is already remapped to ctrl. :p

There will always be other potential physical keys that aren't on your laptop keyboard. You could just as easily say that you shouldn't have to use modifier keys to trigger Page Down on a Macbook Pro keyboard. Where's my Print Screen SysRq key?

Ok so why isn't the 2012 mbp hated because it doesn't have that key?

2012 MBP has the escape key.

It doesn't have print screen / sysreq, why is that OK?

Because those keys are not used nearly as often as escape. And because osx has a different keyboard shortcut for screenshots so the print screen key is largely irrelevant.

The reasons you listed are largely why I don't care that the escape key is gone from where it was.

If only it were so easy to remap my hand! Caps lock is already dedicated to control and most apps don’t support ^[.

Ok then it you have caps remapped to ctrl, remap ctrl to escape.

There are many valid criticisms of the touch bar macs, losing one key in particular is pretty low on the list.

> i[f] you have caps remapped to ctrl, remap ctrl to escape

The whole reason to remap caps lock to ctrl is that ctrl is in a terrible location.

Escape is in a relatively terrible location as well, the default ctrl location is just as bad, hence remapping escape there isn't really worse than escape in the top left.

Check out Karabiner Elements (https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/).

You can create a rule to change caps lock to control if pressed with other keys, else escape if pressed alone.

I have no affiliation with it, just ran into this issue myself and it solved it for me.

That kind of highlights an issue for me though. If Apple were really on the ball with macOS they would have a better remap utility built in.

Instead we have Karabiner Elements which has been of mixed stability in my experience.

Many times I've had it completely disable the internal keyboard on my late 2013 MBP to the point where I have to plug in a USB keyboard to recover or if on the road do a force power reset.

“You are holding it wrong”?

Not so much when you already remap the Caps lock key to Ctrl though.

I have an esc key...?

They didn't remove it, at least not functionally. There's still an ESC, it's just on the Touch Bar now.

That's not an escape key. Please don't apologize for this.

I use vim and switch between a butterfly/touchbar Mac (work machine) and a Thinkpad (personal machine). Using the Mac keyboard has actually negatively impacted my typing speed when I use other systems! I remapped my vim keybindings, and now my muscle memory has atrophied.

This dumb machine has actually made me a worse typist. I am so frustrated.

Remap caps lock to escape. I use vim and I can't stand the "standard" esc key position anymore.

That sucks for you. I'm able to use it just fine and the Touch Bar is way more functional for me both as a developer and for editing digital media.

MacOS supports remapping caps lock to escape. No hacks needed!

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