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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Holy heck, they re-added a physical escape key. That's a huge improvement. a slight shame they didn't just move the touchbar up and re-add the F key row too, but it is a good compromise and improvement regardless.

This could be the one a lot of people have been waiting for if the new switches/design pans out.

PS - Although I might be an unusual demographic as I touch type and wouldn't use the touchbar regardless (since I look at the screen, not the backs of my hands while I interact with a Mac).

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> physical escape key

I'm happy we VIM users have been loud enough to get the most important key back. :-)

I know there's Ctrl-[ but it's 20 years of muscle memory to retrain, and I don't want to do that.

I really recommend rebinding caps lock to escape. macOS lets you do that natively in keyboard setting nowadays. Still muscle memory to relearn, of course.

Caps Lock is already my Ctrl key, I don't want to get cramps everytime I press Ctrl-C.

I got used to capslock in less than a day when I got MBP. I recommend BetterTouchTool to remove the faux escape key and replace it with something as annoying as "Previous track".

After listening to the same track for a few hours it really stuck.

But you can't rebind esc to anything (natively), so you lose caps lock. Am I the only one who declares constants and envvars in capitals? And how do people write SQL? With their elbow on the shift key?

The new versions of sql don’t require capital letters on all the keywords. :p

More seriously color syntax highlighting works far better than capitalizing almost everything in sight. I’d recommend dropping the caps convention.

Caps for envvars is not a cosmetic convention, it's a style convention to indicate if a variable was sourced from the shell/parent/sourced file vs an internal definition.

Caps for constants is a long standing convention in many style guides and standard libraries.

You appear to be referring to shell scripts. I do not have an opinion on shell script capitalization. However, my opinion on capital keywords in SQL is that it is a relic of an older time when it was used to help visual parsing of the query.

Going further I’m of the opinion that color syntax highlighting does that job far better thus rendering the capital convention obsolete.

Note: you may have a different opinion than me and if you do the laws of the code formatting holy war demand that I assert that you’d be wrong.

acronyms?

I either hold down shift for short vars or use the vim uppercase motion. After a variable is declared then I use autocomplete.

SQL does not have to be written in uppercase generally. If you care, use an autoformatter.

I have Karabiner Elements configured to toggle CapsLock with the LShift+RShift combination. Pretty handy, and unlikely to ever hit it accidentally.

I've always just typed constants and SQL with my pinky on the left Shift key. It feels easier than having to toggle Caps Lock all the time.

In situations where I'm excited and messaging my friends to yell, I've typed entire sentences mostly holding down Left Shift. After some experimentation, it looks like even for normal sentence capitalization, I never use Right Shift unless I'm typing one-handed.

I wonder if there's a way to configure a double-press of left Shift to enable Caps Lock, like we're used to on phone keyboards.

Seems like Karabiner can handle that: https://github.com/pqrs-org/Karabiner-Elements/issues/346

Karabiner Elements is free and will let you bind Esc to Caps Lock. It actually allows general remapping for instance I use a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard with my Mac and have that stupid menu key remapped to be a second Option.

I stopped using caps in SQL a few years ago, it changed my life for the better

Yeah I SHIFT everything capital letters. Feel better than Capslock. Not a Mac user but I wish my laptop has semi-full size keyboard (that includes everything excluding the number pad), but that's too big for laptops I guess :(

Using Karabiner, I have caps lock mapped to escape, and shift+caps lock toggles caps lock.

Many of us remapped Caps Lock to Ctrl years ago. I know there's a way to use it for both but it's not smooth because it adds a firing delay.

Best move is to bind `jj` to escape.

Except that doesn’t work in every other app that doesn’t understand vi keys.

I’ve been doing this, as prompted by being assigned a touchstrip MacBook at my last job.

Have to say I was able to retrain pretty quickly. jj is now my first instinct even on full-sized keyboards. I now think it’s really an improvement. All about staying on that home row as much as possible..

What kind of monster doesn’t map Caps Lock to CTRL??

I’ve only been using vim for about 10 years but I’m pretty sure I’ve hit escape less than a few thousand times in those years. One of the first things I did was imap jk <Esc> and it turns out that’s really all I need Escape for (Ctrl-C is goto to return to normal mode)...

I think it's more like Excel users have been loud enough. Esc is very important for Excel.

You shouldn't be happy that they added that back, you should be pissed that they took it out in the first place, well knowing how many developers use Mac.

"Holy heck, they re-added a physical escape key. That's a huge improvement"

Amazing how this can be the first comment. What would be next? USB ports? Even jack ports on the iPhone?! /s

> a slight shame they didn't just move the touchbar up and re-add the F key row too

yeah, considering the massive 16" size, there's definitely room for another row of keys. I could see if a diminuitive air came out with touchbar, you want both weight and space savings so nuke it. but with 16" and six speakers just add the damn keys!

> Although I might be an unusual demographic as I touch type

This gave me a chuckle since nearly every person I know (90% at least) is a touch typer.

Whats with you guys and the ESC key? It's so far away do you actually use it? I map caps-lock to ESC/Hyper key which I find pretty useful.

I can reach it from the starting row (ASDF) of my left hand without moving it. This might be more impactful to people with small hands.

I grew up playing games like StarCraft so I have muscle memory of moving my hand to the top row for control group management. It's no big deal.

Vim

I'm old and I've been using vim for decades. Remapping caps lock on the internal keyboard would just confuse me because I use my external keyboard as much as I use the internal one, and my external keyboard has caps lock remapped to Command.

The remapping can be used on all your connected keyboards and per keyboard, whatever you prefer.

And if you want extended remapping I'd recommend https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ especially if you're missing the function keys, you can remap that to be fn + number row. So you will have easy access to those as well.

> Whats with you guys and the ESC key? It's so far away do you actually use it?

You're joking. You realize this forum is filled with programmers and other digital creative professionals, right?

I am both a digital creative professional and a developer/programmer and I can't remember when was the last time I pressed the escape key. If anything, it might have been to exit a full-screen video where the UI had mysteriously disappeared because some crappy website couldn't deal with an ad-blocker.

Programmers and creative professionals don't unilaterally love or need the ESC key like you're suggesting.

For me frequent usecase for ESC is to hide some popup that you opened by accident.

Like "Save As" dialog / rename file / Purchase SublimeText License / etc. In macOS you can hide many types of dialogs with ESC

That's fine but you can still do that without the physical key, can't you? I'm still able to escape out of dialogs like that without needing a physical key.

You can also type on a smartphone without a physical keyboard...

That's exactly what I mean, yall are smart, that's why I assumed yall would remap it somewhere that makes sense.

If anything, I'd remap capslock to be escape.

Ya, i've used this: https://brettterpstra.com/2017/06/15/a-hyper-key-with-karabi... to do that.

And having the hyper key is awesome (command+control+option+shift). Makes it super handy for shortcuts to open commonly used program shortcuts like calendar etc

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