Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

#51

Post by bbcbasic »

1_2__3 wrote: post #47
mod wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toy devices? Are you not exposed to modern mobile devices? Anyone with a child that has access to a tablet can tell you that touch-input is succeeding.

I call it a toy, you express indignation and then use children as an example. The way children use toys is not the way adults use tools. Touchscreens have proven great for "consumption" devices like phones, and have proven pretty terrible for most everything else. I'm not being too hard on them I should say, but anyone who thinks traditional input devices will be replaced in general purpose computing with touchscreen…

I agree. Excuse the short comment I'm typing this on a touchscreen.

Re: Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

#52

Post by tygorius »

weinzierl wrote: post #30
eridius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I map 'jk' to escape, but if I'm ssh'd into a machine without my config, I can also press ^[ instead (since I too map caps lock to control), that's still easier than hitting the physical escape key.

I used 'jj' for a while but the short delay to display j threw me off. I have Ctrl on Caps Lock so pressing Ctrl-[ is decent but still: I never got used to it. I met Bram at Vimfest in Berlin recently and asked him if he remaps Esc. He said something along the lines of: "No, I aim for the upper left of my keyboard and hope for the best".

I too stopped using 'jj' because of the short delay. FWIW I've found ';l' to work well as a replacement. (For a trial period I had them both mapped to in my vimrc file.) ';l' seems a natural, but distinctive, rolling motion for me and I've never had it conflict with real-world text entry.

Re: Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

#53

Post by stevep001 »

I ended up with a ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen 2 -- it has a five row physical keyboard, with the top row as a virtual keyboard.

It was constantly registering touches on the top row when I didn't want them. With a laptop, I commonly rest my hand on the keyboard and touch -- but don't depress -- keys.

Today it's only used in a desktop configuration with an external keyboard.

I'm not the only one who felt this way -- see, for example, this Ars review of the gen 3, which said of the gen 2 keyboard:

"...the keyboard shed its top row of function keys, replacing them with a software-controlled touchable strip, and used a peculiar arrangement for buttons including home, insert, backspace, and delete. The result wasn't better; it was awkward."

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/thinkpad-x1-carbon-re...

Re: Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

#54

Post by lj3 »

stevep001 wrote: post #53

I ended up with a ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen 2 -- it has a five row physical keyboard, with the top row as a virtual keyboard. It was constantly registering touches on the top row when I didn't want them. With a laptop, I commonly rest my hand on the keyboard and touch -- but don't depress -- keys. Today it's only used in a desktop configuration with an external keyboard. I'm not the only one who felt this way -- see, fo…

Lenovo has a bad track record with all things touch. For example, I have a w530 and the trackpad is terrible. Apple, on the other hand, has a history of well engineered touch hardware, especially the touchpad.

Maybe a touch strip will be great or maybe it'll be rubbish, but don't pre-judge the feature based on Lenovo's increasingly shoddy engineering.

Re: Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

#55

Post by snowwrestler »

1_2__3 wrote: post #38
snowwrestler wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the touch bar might introduce opportunities for more sophisticated and flexible interfaces.

Will it, though? I feel like we're in the part of history right now where - when it comes to computers anyway - we're going with what's cool rather than what works. I'd say in general touchscreens have continued to be an utter failure as a general-purpose input device, and that's why we only see it on toy devices. Anything where what you type matters still uses some kind of mechanical feedback. Maybe with haptic feed…

Look at how volume and brightness control is done on a Macbook. They took function keys and repurposed them into crude up and down buttons. To get fine control you have to hold down the Shift and Alt keys. If you want to actually use the "function" part of the function key, you have to hold down the Fn button.

A touch control there could present a more intuitive interface--tap the control you want, then use a touch slider to adjust with great precision.

Another idea I saw in a blog post was to put a scrubber control there during video editing. Currently the trackpad has to serve double duty controlling the features of the application, and controlling the scrubbing of the content.

The function keys are a UI mess. Each serves double or triple duty, and the duties sometimes change with OS releases. For example, the Dashboard key on my Macbook Pro no longer activates the Dashboard.

This is just like the situation on smart phones when they all shipped with physical keyboards. Each tiny button on my Blackberry had at least 2 different functions. As Steve Jobs said, "we solved this problem with a bitmapped screen and a pointing device."

Re: Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

#56

Post by cauterized »

mod wrote: post #42
taurath wrote: post #39

I think they'll just replace the tilde key with the escape key if the photo is a new MBP. I press escape OFTEN, but tildes rarely. For the most part its to get into consoles in games or other dev functions - I could see myself losing it and not being too sad.

The tilde key is also the ` key. (I have no idea what the name of it is). That's used in markdown and ES6 pretty commonly. Losing that key is a problem for me.

Backtick. It's also used in bash scripting; and in Slack and presumably some other chat services it's used to delimit quoted code (forcing monospaced output).

Re: Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

#57

Post by gamedna »

dfsegoat wrote: post #13
gamedna wrote: post #11

Back when the iPad was released, I ran a 6 month experiment to see if I could live as a developer using only the iPad and the cloud. My initial findings were quite positive, and the first few weeks were exciting and new. As time progressed, task switching and copy/paste were obvious shortcomings due to limitations with iOS, but the experience was mostly bearable but not awful. Towards the end it became unbearable as…

Have a blog / write up which chronicles your experiment? I always wondered if I, or anyone could do this when i first got my ipad.

Yes, but it was posted company internal and I do not have the rights to republish. What were you most interested in so I can summarize in a paragraph or two here?

Re: Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

#58

Post by sotojuan »

miketwo wrote: post #49
weinzierl wrote: post #2

I'm in the market for the new MacBok Pro and the OLED row makes me excited, but as a Vim user the lack of an physical escape key would be problem for me. I have Caps Lock mapped to Ctrl and I'm glad that MacOS provides this option out of the box, but Caps Lock as Esc is not an option for me. I hope there will be an out of the box way to map Escape to something sensible. I'd trade ~ for Esc anytime, as long as ~ and `…

Karabiner ( https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner ) allows Caps Lock to act as Escape when tapped, but as Ctrl when held down. Unfortunately it doesn't yet work with Sierra.

A benefit of this approach is that it's at the OS level, so it'll work even when in ssh.

Re: Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

#59

Post by sotojuan »

busterarm wrote: post #6

I've been using an external keyboard (Realforce 87U at work. A 104 w/ Cherry Blues at home). Other than the coffee-shop crowd, how many of you would say you're exclusively a laptop-keyboard user? Not a dig, just wondering. If Apple offered an iPad Pro, running OSX with USB ports (or a thunderbolt port usb hub) for a physical keyboard, I would switch over in a heartbeat.

People using laptops to program without external keyboards or many monitors is one of those things that is a lot more common than you think!

Re: Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?

#60

Post by taurath »

mod wrote: post #42
taurath wrote: post #39

I think they'll just replace the tilde key with the escape key if the photo is a new MBP. I press escape OFTEN, but tildes rarely. For the most part its to get into consoles in games or other dev functions - I could see myself losing it and not being too sad.

The tilde key is also the ` key. (I have no idea what the name of it is). That's used in markdown and ES6 pretty commonly. Losing that key is a problem for me.

Not as "much" of a problem I'd imagine as losing the escape key (at least for me). Maybe putting it somewhere else?
Post reply on HN