Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

Anyone who has the new model w/ Touch Bar can comment on the usefulness of it, now that it's been out for a while? Do you ever used it / still use it daily?

I use it daily because it's the only place to change volume and do a bunch of essential OS tasks. They replaced the top row of keys with it. However I don't use it for much beyond that.

I've had one for a couple months now, and it largely goes unused on a daily basis. I remapped caps lock to escape for vim usage, so my most common theoretical use of it isn't necessary anymore.

I will say, however, there are moments when it shows promise. The 3rd party app BetterTouchTool lets you put custom shortcuts on it, so I created some utility shortcuts for things I never remember how to do, like taking screenshots. In those moments it's very nice, but I don't think I'd think less of the computer without the touchbar.

There are times that its shortcuts make it convenient for you to work and actually save your time. e.g. pdf editing shortcuts and also facetime shortcuts as well as email writing cpabailities.

I run architecture software on Windows and Mac on my MBP.

On software that supports it I use it and vastly prefer it to F-keys. For instance, I never remember the F-key shortcuts for AutoCAD. In the macOS version, with icons on the Touch Bar, I use them all the time and it's fantastic. For system shortcuts, I find it about the same as using the F-keys on the previous model.

On Windows, I frequently brush by the Touch Bar when entering numbers (for dimensions) and pressing escape to cancel commands. Even the side of a finger is enough to trigger a shortcut, unlike a physical key that requires some amount of force directed downward. This is quite frustrating and likely a real productivity loss with no real gain for software that just shows standard F-keys. I should re-map my caps lock key but I need to switch between camel case for naming objects and all-caps for notes frequently.

I hope that I can eventually customize the bar in BootCamp and then it will be a mild improvement over the old way but neutral-to-negative unless you're in macOS on supported software only and then if you don't already have muscle memory for the shortcuts.