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Comment by Keloran | Hacker News Reader

I quite like the Touch Bar, with things like pock it means I can have full screen, hide the dock entire and still have notifications

And the ability to set custom apps inside it with iterm, and not have to loose a key on the board itself

I spend most of my time in vi when in terminal, and never had a “I’m missing an escape” ever

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Touch Bar would have been more useful had they have an external keyboard with it. Almost no developers supported it because it was only available on a subset of devices. And then only in the case when people actually use the internal keyboard. I guess this excludes a lot of people who hook their computers to an external keyboard, screen and so on all the time.

It’s quite like 3D Touch in this sense. (But I actually liked 3D Touch, unlike the Touch Bar)

Yes! Apple sells ~18-21 million Macs a year. Out of those no MacBook Air, no iMac, no Mac mini, no iMac Pro, no Mac Pro, and some models of 13" MacBook Pro have the Touch Bar. Apple never went all-in on it. Though I'm happy if they're indeed going back to physical function keys.

Anyone who spends significant time in vim has already remapped ESC to something else anyway, be it caps-lock or a key combo.

The 2019 MPB does have an 'esc' key.

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-16/

I changed Caps Lock to work as ESC and I'll never go back.

I did this too, one downside though is that it's become such muscle memory for me at this point that using someone else's computer always results in my hitting caps lock instead of escape the first few times.

Yeah, that's the unfortunate downside. But it hasn't really happened to me since last March for some reason.

I’ve mapped it to ctrl for a while now and I’ll never go back either. In vim I use ctrl—[ for Esc, which I only started to do when the MBP added the Touch Bar.

I agree after a year or so with my 16" MBP. My first attitude was that it was useless after hearing years of complaints. This machine has the physical escape key and I believe that combination really works.

I'm not using the Touch Bar constantly, even when typing on the built-in keyboard. Discovery is slow because you have to become familiar with which options are available in specific applications and for specific contexts. This is a legitimate problem. Over time I've built up a decent number of uses that I know are there and make life better.

The negativity is unreasonable to me. It would be very interesting to know how much a Touch Bar increases the cost of each MacBook. To me it seems Apple took a section of the keyboard very, very few users used and replaced it with something that probably can be helpful to most users at least some of the time.

I also love the Touch Bar.

One thing that have helped my tendinitis was getting used to the Ctrl-C shortcut instead of the Esc (both are defaults to enter normal mode).

I also like the Touch Bar, and wish that I could get an external keyboard with an integrated Touch Bar.

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