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Comment by protonimitate | Hacker News Reader

The Touch Bar is honestly by least favorite aspect of anything Apple has done in recent memory.

My touch bar had dead pixels (twice), effectively wiping out half the function keys. And when it did work, it was hard to use.

I've been using my MBP as a desktop for the past 8+ months, and while it's slightly better experience, it still sucks that I'm stuck having to buy 3 USB adapters just to make it usable.

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I will say I really like the lock button and the touch ID integration. I hate the lack of physical escape key (especially for vim); however, they are fixing that on many (most? all?) new models. Mostly I'm pretty meh about the touch bar. Not sure how much cost it's adding, but I'd probably rather they reduce the cost.

Have you considered remapping Caps Lock to Escape? There's an option for that in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences.

I've remapped Caps Lock to Control, which turned out to be very useful in various Remote Desktop and VirtualBox scenarios since it requires a left-Control key, which Mac laptop keyboards are missing.

FWIW, escape is actually slower (both in movement speed and in actual invokation) than ^[.

lit: `CTRL+[`

I know habits die hard, and "you're holding it wrong" is not a valid excuse- and I know that I also dislike massively not having an escape key.

But for vim specifically; there is an escape sequence and the escape key is an alternative method for that. (similar to how the arrows "work" but hjkl is the "real" way of moving).

So you’re saying that pressing two keys is faster than pressing one key? In which universe??

Is eating 2 sandwiches also faster than eating one?

Are 2 electrical impulses also faster than 1?

I think not.

yes pressing two keys can be faster than pressing one, because you have two hands, pressing A+L is faster than pressing control+delete, due to locality.. your hands are likely closer to A+L than control and delete.

Locality is important, in fact it's the largest factor in determining speed of a hotkey's access.. "distance from home-row"[0] is a measurement that is consistently touted when referring to vim in particular.

Control+[ is significantly faster because your hands move independently. However I'm just now remembering that I always remapped my capslock to be an additional control, so it isn't necessarily universal that control is "as fast" since my "control" is actually on the homerow.. which is unusual.

As it happens, though I was wrong earlier and was confusing ^c and ^[

from `:h i_CTRL-C`

> CTRL-C: Quit insert mode, go back to Normal mode. Do not check for abbreviations. Does not trigger the InsertLeave autocommand event.

^[ is interpreted exactly the same as ESC; vim can't see a difference. (you can see this under `:h keycode` )

[0]: https://books.google.se/books?id=LA9QDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT201&lpg=P...

My beef is that ESC in macOS is the universal non-destructive dismiss button. I'm glad they went back to making it a physical key.

This really depends on your keyboard layout. On mine (Canadian Multilingual, yes, I like my accents), [ is actually Alt+9. So Ctrl+[ becomes Ctrl-Alt-9 which is an unwieldy combination, to say the least. I like my Esc key where it is.

I know this answer is "buy something else to make your life eaiser" but hear me out - either a USB-C monitor, or a thunderbolt dock.

I got a USB-C monitor last time I upgraded (LG 27" 4K) and having a single cable to plug in, which not only carries the display signal, but also charges my MBP, AND carries the USB signal so that I can plug wired keyboard and anything else into the hub in the monitor still feels ridiculously futuristic to me.

Any recommendations on a TB3 dock? I recently searched for one, and none of the top rated ones can support a 16" MBP power requirements. One of the manufacturers even went as far as saying "How often do you really use your CPU/GPU at 100%?"[0]

Dell and HP have higher powered docks, but there are many conflicting reports on if it can deliver 96W to non-dell/hp laptops.

TB3/USB-C is a giant mess that is too confusing for even techies to reliably navigate.

[0] - https://www.caldigit.com/using-the-16-macbook-pro-with-the-c...

Looking at the link, if you peg the CPU and GPU to 100% even the charger that comes with the MBP will struggle.

Another 100w option is the Targus dock - https://us.targus.com/products/usb-c-universal-quad-4k-docki...

Personally I find the razer core x chroma really good

It’s a hub secondary, and an egpu primarily, but it works fine to power my

Personal 2019 mbp 13 (1.7 i7, 16gb)

Personal Lenovo s740

Work 2019 mbp 16 (2.8 i7, 16gb)

CalDigit TS3 Plus: I have a 16” MBP and two 4K monitors, keyboard and mouse attached to it.

Charging works fine even though I don’t think it pumps same power as PSU out.

I do a lot of Rust programming and use VMs too. Haven’t run into a situation where it runs out of juice while attached.

I can second this recommendation. Not cheap, but this dock has been excellent.

Yeah, sure, but at least on my Macbook Pro 16, Thunderbolt/USB-C monitors both instantly make the area near the touch bar hot enough so as to be uncomfortable to the touch.

If you're sharing a screen via video conference, you can easily hit 90c, with the CPU throttling hard the whole time.

That's because the second you plug an external monitor in (at all) it switches off the iGPU and spins up the dGPU on the old 15" and new 16" ... what you're feeling is the dGPU pumping out heat.

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