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Comment by turblety | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing to me that they didn't learn from Apple's mistakes. All we heard about for months was how annoying not having a physical escape key was. It even forced Apple to change the keyboard on newer models, with a physical escape key and then the touchbar to the right.

But here we go, Dell has decided to put a capacitive escape key. They really need to know their market better.

Anyway, it looked like a nice laptop. Totally unusable to a developer without a physical escape key.

*edited, thanks for the correction cassianoleal

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Dell will learn the hard way and backtrack, or will abandon Dev edition XPSs due to low demand (due to idiotic keyboard). And no, remapping keys to Esc or whatever isn't acceptable, just as it wasn't on Apple's touch bar notebooks (RIP).

It is the developer edition. The important thing is that developers cannot escape.

It really an immense design flaw in my opinion and honestly the problems here should be predictable enough to not even make the mistake in the first place.

Is the laptop actually physically different than the regular XPS 13 ?

I seem to remember, a while ago, when this new model was introduced, that it looked exactly the same.

It's the xps13 plus. A different model with a hidden trackpad and a keyboard very reminiscent of Apple's butterfly keyboard together with touchbar

It is a flaw that can be overcome by mapping escape to caps, which everyone does anyway, or by using ^[ which is more conveniently placed anyway. That doesn't seem so immense.

I solved this by having large hands. I usually also use function keys which seems to be difficult as well with such a layout. The arrow keys could also induce nightmares for me. Especially up/down being smaller than left/right.

That got my interest. Why companies are trying to do this? Isn't the ESC key one of the commonly used keys on the keyboard? What's a net gain by replacing it?

Dell claimed that physical keyboard is too thick to put in enough cooling for 28W Alder Lake-P chip in thin-and-light form factor. The touchbar is much thinner allowing more room for the heat spreader.

Having seen benchmark number from XPS 13 Plus compared with other notebook equipped with Alder Lake-P, it looks like it's working.

Maybe for vi users, on GUI based OSes it mostly boils down to dismissing dialog windows.

You can switch Escape with caps lock. It's easy to do in linux and arguably better if you get used to it for vim keybinding ergonomics

But how do you caps lock ?

Remapping a combination of the windows key + another key like a backspace to Caplock gets the job done for me. Even shift + caplock would also solve the problem

I remapped caps lock to control many years ago in Tweaks, Keyboard & Mouse, Additional Layout Options, Caps Lock Behavior. I can enable caps lock by pressing both shift keys and disable it by pressing any shift.

Shift-Capslock

I usually do both shifts together for Caps Lock. I basically never use it anyway.

In my case, I have a physical Escape key, but use Caps as my "hyper" key to interact with the WM.

If you're using X11, the incantation goes into your keyboard config (the last one is what's of interest):

    % cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-custom-kbd.conf
    Section "InputClass"
      Identifier "keyboard defaults"
      MatchIsKeyboard "on"

      Option  "XKbModel" "pc105"
      Option  "XKbLayout" "us"
      Option  "XKbVariant" "mac"

      Option  "XKbOptions" "shift:both_capslock"
    EndSection

Even FORTRAN has come to accept the existence of lower case characters nowadays.

I would rather know: why do you caps lock?

I think many if not most people never use it at all.

The whole keyboard looks like form over function. I have never touched them, so I’m curious about other people’s experience.

I have the last Intel i7 Macbook Pro which has the physical escape key and capacitive bar. I still miss the rest of the keys being physical, having the choice between either having to tap multiples times to change volume or lose the "extra features" of the bar is a no-brainer.

There is literally nothing I use or seen that meaningfully uses that bar. I've not even seen a useful implementation by Apple.

Considering that the Macbook Pro also is generally about 40 degrees at the back of the keyboard when I do work on it, I'm not really inclined to put my hands back there anyway.

> Dell has decided to put a capacitive escape key

Not only that - the touchbar is dynamic and adapts to the program that has the focus. This is a set of almost fixed-function spots. This is beyond stupid.

Not only that, also those halve size arrow keys. How do they expect people to navigate their code? With hjkl? But then why not physical escape key?

> It even forced Apple to change the keyboard on newer models, with a capacitive escape key and then the touchbar to the right.

The capacitive ESC was part of the touch bar on older models. After that, they added a physical, scissor ESC key like the rest of the keyboard. Thankfully on newer models they got rid of the touch bar altogether.

16gb ram

No escape key

Zero travel keyboard

DEVELOPER EDITION!

They need to remove inventory of their stupidity so they need to promote this hard and get on the next batch with real ESC keys.

It is a developer laptop, though. Who wants to get pinky arthritis when ^[ is right there?

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