Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Yes, let's write a blog post about something I haven't even used yet. I, too, have memorized "every key on the keyboard". I've even gone as far as to memorize keyboard shortcuts! (Which imagine is the wording the author was really going for.)

What problem does the Touch Bar solve, the author asks? I'm glad you asked! As just a singular example of why I'd almost buy a new MBP just for this feature, I switch between Xcode and Android Studio multiple times per day. Now, is it F6 to step over? Or is that Xcode, and F8 is what I really want? Add to that the many years of burning Visual Studio shortcuts into my muscles and I can't keep track of which button to press just to step into a method. I ass-u-me this can be solved by instead putting "Step Over" in place of what used to be the F8 key. Now what I'd really like are OLED keycaps so that "F8" gets replaced with "Step Over" on a physical key. But I'll take the Touch Bar; close enough.

Other examples abound, but I'll leave it at that. The whole post struck me as "Apple made an announcement. Quick, write a contrarian post!"

Though he also makes a very good point that even Steve Schiller mentioned in the keynote (from what I've read, I haven't watched it).

They kept the headphone jack because a huge amount of time is spent with the computer at a desktop plugged in to stereo speakers. Do you work at your desk using your laptop keyboard?

So, if the majority of time is spent using an external keyboard, did apple create an external keyboard with the touch functionality? Will developers built their apps to take advantage of this functionality if it is only available to the subset of users who have purchased this new device AND are currently not at their desk??

Do people not rebind their keys any more? As it stands, I have the same debug shortcuts for VS, PyCharm, and gdb (with some dirty hacks).

Additionally, how many applications will end up supporting the touch bar in an intuitive and effective way? I use macs fairly rarely, and I've never used the touchbar, but the whole graphical buttons thing just feels like a toolbar pulled down from the screen onto my keyboard. We mostly learned shortcut keys to reduce the amount of looking at toolbars and moving mice. Now, we'll have to instead look for toolbar icons that every application has in a different order, with different icons, and move our hands way from the keyboard just as we used to with mice.

I think that the touch bar in reality does have a purpose. It serves a very small slice of users nicely, and the rest it will be a novelty. For most people, it doesn't feel like a net gain.

Do people not rebind their keys any more?

Oh, you bet; enough so that I'm tired of doing it. I don't know about you, but I can't touch type the function keys anyway (I can barely touch type the number row accurately), so looking down is what I'm going to do anyway (except when stepping through, then I rest my finger on the appropriate F* key).

Though I think I'll get some mileage out of Touch Bar, I also think it's one of those things we should at least try before rushing to judgement and firing up the blogging tool. I, too, once thought the iPad was just an overgrown iPhone, until FedEx dropped one at my door.

Maybe it would work for you but it alienated all vim users out there... Now we replace the esc button with a slower softbutton for the sake of... beauty??? I am not impressed at all.

Maybe it would work for you but it alienated all vim users out there

One guess as to my primary text editor for the last 25 years. A second guess as to how often I use the Escape key. (Hint: never.)

You are a vim user and never use esc? You either map it to another key for not apparent reason or not using it really.

For "no apparent reason"? ESC is incredibly non-ergonomic. If you use vim and don't use capslock or jj you're setting yourself up for RSI.

The use of vim requires neither the use of the Escape key nor key remapping. I'll leave the "how" as an exercise for the reader, it should be quite discoverable (discoverable for vim, anyway).

If pressing Ctrl+[ is your alternative and you prefer to press two keys instead of one then we are definitely not in the same group of people, I don't even considered an option.

I'm an extremely fast typist in general (150+ wpm for general English sentences), but I still struggle to accurately hit the function keys on most keyboards without looking or at least glancing down.

To me this touch bar actually seems almost like a no brainer as long as it gets proper support from apps. Removing the escape key I'm less thrilled about but can easily live with. And I say that as someone who lives and dies by vim.

I certainly wouldn't buy a new MBP just due to the touch bar, but I'd view it as a nice add on.

Maybe what we need is Siri that can replace IDE shortcuts

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