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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Yes.... But you know what I REALLY miss that I didn't expect to? Touchbar on the Macbook Pro. I hated that stupid touch bar, but on the new macbook pro it's gone, and I miss it so much. I'm dyslexic and having the words pop up predictively made me so efficient, I find myself going back to my old macbook pro when doing long from writing as I'm considerably faster on it as I don't have to stop and think about every single word. If someone wrote an app that mimics the touchbar predictive text, I'd buy it.

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Surely there is someone who could program an on-screen predictive box that is more easily readable than this current possible solution for this [0]. Maybe this TouchBar simulator is something that you could try [1]? I wonder if it works on machines that don't have it at all.

[0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/326664/can-i-get-w...

[1] https://github.com/sindresorhus/touch-bar-simulator

Huzzzzza! The touch bar simulator worked perfectly!I will make a donation to that developer. Thanks!

I loved the Touchbar from day one. I ultimately had about 60 custom buttons spread across a dozen apps. Now I’m back to wondering if F4 is mapped to “toggle responsive design mode” or “clear cache and refresh”.

I wish the M1's had it too, I skipped everything by holding onto a maxed out mid-2015 mbp. I'm glad Apple got rid of the butterfly keyboard, added ports back, but I was never against the touch bar, I wanted to play with it. I think I would have had an issue missing a separate function key bar though.

i wish the touch bar was slightly shorter and the keyboard had a dedicated escape key instead. the function keys i use much less frequently.

The 2020 mac book pro does have an escape key left to the touch bar.

(and touch id on the other side! the topic of this thread)

awesome!

The person you replied to found touch bar simulators to be a solution. Check above.

The touch bar was very interesting tech! My favorite use was scrubbing songs/videos and being able to adjust the brightness of my monitor and screen independently. That's where the tech shined- having context-dependent UI elements. When you hit the physical brightness button, you just have to guess what's going to get adjusted.

I think with most things, the answer here was to have a mix of keys and buttons. With 100% TB, it's slow to change volume/brightness. With 100% keys, I've got all these extra keys I can't use (you can re-bind them with 3rd party software, but it's fairly static).

I'd personally pull like, F3-F9 in favor of a touch bar, and then be able to configure the remaining buttons. I'm a little sad reaction was so strongly against the idea on the whole, it definitely had potential.

Agreed, I like it. It's basically just a display for Spotify, but it's very handy.

Make it shorter, put in a physical escape key and it'd be perfect.

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