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Comment by williamdclt | Hacker News Reader

You can program your touchbar with something like BetterTouchTool. It's laughable that Apple ships the touchbar with such useless functionalities, but you can turn the touchbar into whatever you want, it's an amazing tool. For example, when I open iTerm I have buttons for my local development env (DB, redis, api, frontend, various microservices) color-coded by status and can start/stop them by tapping a button. You could program buttons for your git workflow, for managing browser tabs, desk spaces... If you can't find a way to make it more useful than fn keys, that's on you frankly.

All of that only applies if you're a dev, so I definitely agree that the touchbar was a fuckup from Apple, but it happens that it's massively useful for me

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I can see state indicators for various services being remotely useful. But git workflow? I have terminals open anyway and everything is easily accessible from shell using aliases and ^R etc anyway.

Is there a way to decouple touchbar from active window btw? For example if I have Skype running I'd like to have Skype's buttons on touchbar regardless of focused window. I tried using BetterTouchTool but all I found out was quite hacky ways to mimic keypresses and whatnot instead of pinning app specific UIs.

> But git workflow?

Useless to me too, that's just an example out a million things you could do.

> Is there a way to decouple touchbar from active window btw

You can, touchbar items are global, app-scoped or part of a group that you can open/close programatically (clicking on a touchbar button, usually). The annoying bit is syncing: you'll need to poll for the state of Skype.

> You can program your touchbar with something like BetterTouchTool.

I just have no use for a touchbar. After all, I have a screen! I never look at my keyboard.... it’s all about tactile feedback, which the touchbar notoriously lacks.

> I just have no use for a touchbar

I find this very narrow-minded. You can't imagine a single thing that a programmable tactile interface would bring over keys (that you probably can't reliably touch-type either, fn keys are far)?

I never looked at my keyboard either. I still don't, I look at my touchbar from time to time to do things that would take me longer to do if I had to move a cursor (checking the time, my next calendar event, controlling music amongst a dozen things)

I agree that there are probably some cool uses for the touch bar if you put some thought in to tailoring it to your work flow, but it is not a tactile interface. Keys are a tactile interface. You can't discern anything from the touchbar by touch, its a flat piece of glass.

Personally, I've never spent any time trying to customize the touch bar because I am never using my laptop without an external keyboard, because of how fuckin' terrible the built in one is. So happy they added some travel back to the keys. I have put off buying a new laptop for years because of how much I hate that stupid keyboard.

> I still don't, I look at my touchbar from time to time to do things that would take me longer to do if I had to move a cursor (checking the time, my next calendar event, controlling music amongst a dozen things)

Moving the mouse doesn't really bother me, and there are a million ways to wire functionality to keyboard expressions or in-UI functionality. I do miss my hardware volume, prev track, next track, play/pause functionality exactly because I could use them easily without shifting focus at all, even to my keyboard.

OTOH I'm not holding my breath for Apple to meet my needs, they aren't that kind of company.

I mean, you can always use more screen. On my touchbar I display the time, battery, weather. I also have a script to start a timer and display the time remaining on it (or the output of any script, really). It saves some screen estate. It's nice!

Also there are actions you can program on the touchbar that don't require looking at it. For instance I set it up so that sliding two fingers anywhere on the touchbar changes the volume.

Personally I find more screen real estate doesn’t do anything for my productivity, which is rarely mechanically limited.

Wow that sounds awesome. You can do this with just BetterTouchTool? Could you share your config?

Well, and a few shell scripts that do the glue between docker-compose and an output that BTT can easily understand. You can write shell/applescript with BTT, but it's not really a good experience

Nothing you describe relies on touchbar, only Fn keys

The visible status and feedback on what pressing the bar will do isn't replicatable with just Fn keys.

It feels like neither's a complete solution: on the touch bar you see what touching a button would do, but you have to look, and even then you don't know if you've touched it since there's no feedback.

On the keyboard, you don't know what a key would do in a given situation.

Sounds like we need a third option.

SAY NO MORE

you do have feedback with the touchbar! As I recently learned, the trackpad click isn't really a click. It can be triggered by software! And bettertouchtool has a specific action for "touchpad haptic feedback". That means you can trigger a touchpad click when you tap a touchbar button, and it perfectly fine as feedback.

Yes you do have to look. I'm not recommending touchbar actions for things that you do so often that it's a problem (though I have a big button to switch between firefox and vscode, big enough that I don't have to look). But it's not like I was using fn keys without looking either

That's really cool, I'ma give it a shot!

There's always https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard but it sounds like it was extremely expensive and hard to type on.

It's not necessarily true you have to look. BTT lets you define actions for sliding 2/3/4 fingers left or right on the entirety of the touchbar. You can set it up to change volume, brightness, ctrl+tab, change the size of a drawing tool, undo/redo, whatever. It works anywhere on the strip, so it's very forgiving.

I actually only just now thought of mapping 3-finger swipe to undo/redo. I've only been messing around with it for five minutes but it's kind of nice, honestly! It's better than cmd+z when you need to undo/redo more than once, because it bypasses the key repeat setting.

I think the bit where the labels change is a pretty big differentiator, for things that are per-app.

Are you old enough to remember when PC applications came with templates that fit over a 101 key keyboard to show you what all the fn keys did? That's why very little outside professional tooling uses them for anything but system-wide shortcuts anymore. They're horrible for discoverability so unless you live in the app enough to thoroughly memorize them they aren't terribly useful.

As much as I don't care for the Hot Bar in general, it is far better for per-app shortcuts that are used rarely enough not to require (and thus develop) muscle memory. You'd need one of those OLED keyboards to do much better.

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