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Comment by stevewodil | Hacker News Reader

I'm a dev and like the touch bar. Ask me anything

I'm a developer also. I have no issues with the Touch Bar. I kind of like it. I never used the F keys anyway. I mapped my escape key to caps lock. I view it as the next iteration or evolution of the basic fingerprint reader on many PC laptops and notebooks.

I am more surprised by the hatred for it. It's extremely easily hackable [0] [1] and I was thinking all sorts of people would up with interesting ideas and uses for it over time.

[0] https://github.com/zakrid/awesome-touchbar

[1] https://github.com/erikolsson/Touch-Bar-Lemmings

I don’t think it would be hated if it didn’t replace the layer of existing keys, or offered any kind of haptic feedback.

I was shocked at a second revision of the MBP without haptic feedback on the Touch Bar.

When your hand accidentally touches that miniature touch screen and random things happen on your mac how do you control the urge to hurl it across a room?

When would my hand accidentally touch the touch bar that sits above the keyboard? I literally don't think this has ever happened to me, I'm being honest

Weird, happens to me all the time, reaching for things on my desk, grabbing the laptop, resting my hand in the slightly wrong place.

I had no idea I was doing it, and couldn't explain the bizarre behaviour until I literally looked at the keyboard, but apparently my left pinky finger is hovering slightly above that area most of the time, and occasionally brushes it lightly enough that I don't even notice—but enough to trigger whatever behaviour is there (particularly irritating as a heavy vim user with a stuttering keyboard, who suddenly finds I'm unexpectedly in normal mode).

Happens to me whenever I hit the number keys just below the touch bar, unless I am very careful. I suspect it is mostly a matter of hand shape.

You are certainly one of the rare ones. This happens to me and my co-workers so often it's become a running joke.

1) Would you like a physical function bar as well?

2) Do you use anything to customize the Touchbar to your liking? (I haven't used OS X in quite a while, and haven't heard of anything)

3) How's the rest of your keyboard doing? Do you like it?

1. Personally, no.

2. I love BetterTouchTool – I use it at work and at home. Ambivalent towards the touch bar without it, LOVE the touch bar with it.

3. My mid-'16 personal Macbook has the "stuttering keyboard" issue – extra characters typed if not careful. I haven't been doing much side-work lately so I can ignore it, but it's a real pain in the ass for sure. Haven't had that issue on my 2018 work Macbook (yet).

2. The touchbar is very customizeable. GoldenChaos-BTT is the best one:

https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete...

I also like the TouchBar and use BetterTouchTool a bit. But the limitation that annoys me is that I can't simultaneously customize it and display app specific context buttons. As in one section customized if a spotify thing is playing, but otherwise make the space available for overriding.

Have you investigated the option in BTT on a button to always display regardless of context?

Right now I have a spotify song display alongside default apple controls. But afaik there isn't the ability to allocate a bit of the touchbar to BTT, Apple default controls, and app specific context controls. BTT takes over most of the bar, but then I lose the ability to easily use pycharm debugging controls for example.

1) No, the only one I could see an argument for would be the escape key, but I'm not fussed about that personally, but I also don't live in Vim. Apps also have custom touchbar functions that are more useful than just the function keys in my opinion (you don't have to learn as many keyboard shortcuts for each app).

2) I don't, other than the customization you can do within macOS. I think the only thing that I've really done is remove the Siri shortcut from it.

3) Good so far. I have a 2018 model which has the silicon membrane under the keys and is supposed to be a bit more resilient. One benefit that this whole mess does have is when my battery deteriorates I can get a new one for free by using the keyboard replacement program. At this point if I didn't already have the MacBook I would wait for the next keyboard design to buy one, but personally have not had issues (yet). As far as the typing experience I find it good for short burst typing and the short key travel is generally fine with me, despite using mechanical keyboards elsewhere.

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