Ask HN: Does anyone use their MBP touch bar for anything?

2 points·hailwren··4 comments

We've had these things for years, and Apple is forcing anyone who wants a new Macbook to adopt one now. So here I am staring at my new one wishing I had physical volume buttons. What can I do with the touch bar?

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Literally the first thing I did was Settings|Keyboard|Touch Bar Shows Function keys and Fn key shows control strip.

Now the touch bar acts just like the setup I had on my 2015 MBP - but I do miss the physical buttons ( debugging in Eclipse burns F6 & F8 into your brain ).

If someone has found a legitimate use case where this silly widget is an enhancement to usability I'd love to hear it.

If you have BetterTouchTool installed, you can do a lot of cool stuff with the touch bar. I have a button that will run a shell script to spin up a local dev environment.

The only function I've added to my touch bar that wasn't previously available was Screenshot, because I do a lot of snapshotting and screen recording, and I'd rather hit that than the stupid Siri button.

I wish there was a way to add custom app-specific shortcuts to the touch bar (maybe there is? I'm not sure). I use Sketch a lot for designing, and I'd love to have access to my document colors and text styles in the touch bar, but no joy.

Used Pock app for app navigation and music control

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