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Comment by messe | Hacker News Reader

> Here's a situation: you're in a conference room with about a dozen other new people. You're handed a touch bar Macbook Pro in a backpack. It's the first such model you've ever used, and you're discovering that your natural typing position overhangs the top row of numbers, and is triggering the "meta" functions which typically live there: brightness up/down, volume up/down, and whatever else might be there from the context of the program you're in.

As much as I hate the touchbar, I've never had this problem. My hands sit on the home row, and my fingers rarely hit anything higher than the midsection of the number keys. I'm genuinely curious as to what natural hand position results in accidentally hitting the touchbar / function keys.

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Happens to me on a semi regular basis. You can learn to tour around it but that’s clearly the sign of a poorly designed input device imho

Thanks. Do you mind me asking if your resting position is above/on the home row? I'm a heavy VIM user with Caps-lock mapped to Control (and using Ctrl-[ for ESC), so I'm well aware that I'm an oddity in how I use a computer.

In any case, the fact that I found it surprising while you're (and others are) running into it on a regular basis, doesn't speak highly of Apple's UX testing.

I think they're saying that they hit the numbers with the fat of their finger instead of the tip. When the key reaches bottom now the tip of your finger may be touching the bottom edge of the touchbar.

I think developers and the odd MMO players are the only ones these days who use the function keys. I really want physical ones back but I don't think I'm going to win that democratic vote. I tend to almost exclusively use an external keyboard with laptops however. The touchbar is not even close to the top ergonomic problem with trying to type 50+ wpm on a laptop.

Yes, I rest my fingers on the home row. Usually what happens is I press one of the number keys and the tip of my finger extends past the top the key I am aiming for.

I am also a heavy vim user with caps mapped to ctrl, so perhaps you're not as odd as you think :-)

Thanks for the extra info. Sounds like we've some capsaicin tolerance in common as well judging by your username. If we're in a simulation, they've definitely gotten lazy.

Indeed, although to be honest I tend to go for the milder stuff these days.

Have you ever considered that maybe the simulation appears just lazy enough to make you skeptical?

I've been using it for about a year and a half and I activate the touchbar at least twice a day. I've never used it intentionally.

I do. When my fingers are resting on a laptop keyboard (actually any not-split keyboard), left pinky is on `q` and left index is on `v`, right index rests on `n`, right pinky between `;`, `p` and `[`. This is much closer to a neutral wrist position, and I curl my fingers while extending the index fingers to place all eight on the home keys. Left thumb is higher than the right, to hit the space bar.

I hit the touch bar by accident most frequently when typing parentheses, since I try not to twist my wrists at all, so I'm curling my left pinky for Shift and moving my whole palm up very slightly for the 9 key, or doing a weird chord for Shift-0 all on the right hand (a habit I'm trying to train myself out of, along with a few stubborn glyph sequences where I type 'y' with my left index).

I'm on the last Intel touchbar-having MacBook I'll ever own, and vowed to never own two of the butterfly keyboards, which they fixed before I left the platform, so Apple is fixing its mistakes juuuust fast enough to not lose me. The only people I've ever heard speak up for the Touch Bar do a lot of photo editing while traveling.

Added: the biggest failure of the touch bar wasn't accidental presses, but the lack of a haptic engine to confirm that it recognizes presses. In fact I'm sure this would reduce accidental hits, because fingers are very sensitive and need that kind of feedback to know they've moved wrong. When I hit play accidentally going for a ), which is The Worst, it's several keystrokes later that my brain realizes I triggered a 'button'.

Conversely, when I am trying to interact with the damned thing, I have to give it my undivided visual attention, and I'm often trying to look at something my own finger is occluding for feedback.

Haptic engine. How did this product ever ship without a Taptic™ engine. Apple makes the best haptic feedback in existence! Make sure you've worn the Watch for at least a week if you want to debate this. I'll never understand that decision, and we'll never know if the touch bar could have worked.

It happened to me like 10 times a day and would detect my fingers not even touching them to the point where I had to plug in an external keyboard.

I tend to hit the language switcher soft button quite often on mine. My code sometimes has és and às where it should have punctuation.

I think it's better for the company to give tech budget and let folk get their preferred gear - perhaps from a set of approved. Just me, I need a franken-box and a bunch of lights in my keyboard

This seems to break down when having to do general it support at medium to large scale.

For prose typing, sure, go ahead and use the home row. My home row is caps-w-e-r-f and h-k-;-enter. I always hit the touch bar enough that I disabled the whole damn thing.

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