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Comment by hatchnyc | Hacker News Reader

I use two MacBooks for programming for several hours each every single day, my personal machine has a touchbar, my work machine does not. I realize this is blasphemous to say and I did think I would hate the touchbar for all the reasons, but I actually ended up liking it.

I had imagined myself tapping virtual function buttons and the whole thing seemed silly and useless and worse than having physical keys, but VS Code and other dev tools actually have good integration, and when I open an app like Adobe Illustrator which I don't use frequently enough to memorize all the hotkeys it's quite handy to have the commands listed.

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Yea, what I really want is physical keys that travel but also have OLED screens built in on the top. Expensive, but best of both worlds.

I hope this is Apple's eventual goal; "expensive and best of both worlds" sounds exactly like something Apple would do.

Me too, but I'm not holding my breath. The idea has been out there for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard

The Optimus Maximus keyboard showed why OLED was a bad choice for the keyboard. Chyrosran22 did a review of a used one that had severe burn in on all the keys.

It would be interesting if someone could make a screen key cap that was compatible with Cherry MX or Alps switches. The problem is with communication and power delivery, though. Could NFC power a tiny E-Ink display?

https://youtu.be/qj7GYU-wedo

I think mini/micro LED displays are the future of making something like that work without burn in issues. They are small and flat enough that you could fit in whatever key you want to. There will be a lot more wires involved although, as each key cap will have a mini display in them in front of the switch, and I'd worry about that wire eventually breaking from the constant moving of that wire inside the keyboard key.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen NFC powered eink displays before! Here’s a random one after a quick Google search, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/7-5-inch-e-ink-displ...

There was a rumour 3 weeks ago that Apple was "Researching Keyboards With Adaptive Displays on Each Key":

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/29/apple-researching-keybo...

I wonder if e-ink might be better -- less energy, could work with a general keyboard backlight?

I think e-ink requires a side-light rather than backlight, as the little spheres are opaque, with a dark side and a light side that physically reorient, meaning illumination from a backlight would have to somehow shine through the dark side, when the dark side faced the backlight, but be blocked by the dark side when it faced outward.

Maybe someone can up with a UV transparent dark side and a fluorescing light side or something.

Interesting, I would think most programmers touch type which at least for me make the touch bar useless. Since it's always changing I have to look down to see what button I am about to press. For me, if it's something common enough that the touchbars ability to change makes that functionality useful I would have found or made a keyboard shortcut for it.

I just upgraded from a MacBook pro to a MacBook air for the main reason it not having a touchbar, and it's much better (for me)!

In many situations, you don't have to look at the touchbar to know what the keys are. For example, when using terminal, vim / ide emulation, I know left is Esc key. It does make spamming Esc feel less weird to me.

I find it harder to touch type on the non physical keys. BTW, you can remap ESC to caps lock. Look into hyperkey ;p

I'm accidentally hitting something on the touch bar all the time, which for me far outweighs anything useful it might do (which is never).

I wouldn't mind having a touch bar if that didn't imply not-having the physical F-keys row. I actually want both. And an additional, programmable row of physical keys if only this was possible :-)

nobody hates the touchbar, they hate that a row was sacrificed for it, instead of just adding it on top.

Please only speak on your behalf, not “everybody”.

Hospital PA: "Mr Art Lebedev to the design HQ please, Mr. Lebedev" https://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/maximus/

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