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Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

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Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#161

Post by yeahboats »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #144
memco wrote: post #21

> I decided to steal this feature and make the "coffee break" button. It locks the laptop and switches the screen off. Ctrl+cmd+q = lock screen. Display will dim/sleep shortly after that. (Found this out myself not too long ago, I think because of HN). Incidentally, I just switched the touch bar to the standard function key display with fn switching to the buttons just like the keyboards of old. I found I almost neve…

Ctrl-Cmd-Q does nothing for me on my tbMBP using the external Magic Keyboard (because I refuse to use the ESC-less, painful, loud internal keyboard) on macOS 10.12.

I believe this is a High Sierra addition.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#162

Post by haukilup »

taftster wrote: post #155
beamatronic wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only time I touch my Touch Bar is to hit the Escape key. Because I use vi. Because I am a professional and theoretically the target audience of $3,000 premium quality laptops.

Funny that you need a $3000 laptop to run vi. Funny in a sad way.

Just because they work in vi as their text editor does not mean they do not run other software on the same laptop. There are fields of software development where performance of your development environment matters.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#163

Post by uptown »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #11

The Touchbar has been mostly a dud for me, and I don't miss it when using my older MBP. I have customized by touch bar to include my favorite actions such as locking the screen, but it is otherwise static. My 2 biggest issues are: - It turns off after 1 min of inactivity, and find it infuriating that I have to wake it up by before using it. Effectively making everything 2 interactions away. - No haptic feedback. Even…

It turns off? I had no idea.

I'd been waiting for them to release this laptop, but ended up going with a lightly used Mid 2015 after Apple announced the specs and price. It was just a misfit for my needs especially after trying the keyboard. The powering-down of the TouchBar sounds like a horrible user experience.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#164

Post by fouc »

everyone wrote: post #43

How do you use a computer without function keys?

It's a good question, you made me think about how rarely do I touch that upper row of buttons on my MBP. Mostly I'm in a web browser or in terminal & vim, so I never end up using the function keys at all. What a waste.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#165

Post by SllX »

bouke wrote: post #4

I’ve been using the 2016 MacBook TouchBar for little over a year now and feel the same pains as mentioned in the article: > As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone would forget about it in a couple of days. At least Siri doesn’t get in t…

> Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app.

I'm thinking I might be misunderstanding this part, but here's a few tips for you:

* Open Mission Control however you invoke it, top right corner there's a + button for adding a new Desktop. You can drag any windows you like into the new desktop or even force an entire app or multiple apps into that particular desktop.

* Hold down the fullscreen button in the title bar of any window, you'll have the option of dragging it to the left or the right. All the windows in the current desktop will go into expose on the other side and you can select one of them to take up the other half of the display. I use this for Mail and Calendar, or two browser windows, or sometimes a text window to take notes and whatever I'm reading on the other side.

Maybe I misunderstood you after all, but if I didn't, then I hope this helped.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#166

Post by stiGGG »

ngngngng wrote: post #140

I was upset about the touch bar because of the esc key since I am a heavy vim user. Then someone recommended I switch my esc and caps lock keys, now it doesn't bug me anymore. The caps lock key is in a much more convenient position for the esc function anyways.

What annoys me is that this esc capslock swapping option only shows up on macs with touch bar. If I should get used to it I need it on all of my machines.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#167

Post by SpaceNugget »

mikenew wrote: post #108
eddyg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make the Caps Lock key even more useful by turning it into a "Hyper" modifier (Command+Ctrl+Option+Shift) when it is held down (great for system-wide shortcuts in Hammerspoon[0], since application shortcuts that use all four modifiers are very rare) but acts like pressing "Escape" when it is tapped . This is easily done with Karabiner Elements[1] and a simple rule[2] you import and enable. [0] http://www.hamm…

Do you happen to know how to do that on a linux machine running X? I'm afraid to dive back into the xkb rule hell-hole to figure it out myself.

you don't need xcape as others have suggested, setxkbmap -option caps:escape does it with just xkbmap.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#169

Post by dragonshed »

ktta wrote: post #152
merb wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15" has no "new" hardware. the 15" non-touchbar model is the old one, without usb-c and old processor.

There's a 13" new one without touchbar.

As others have pointed out, the 13" max specs are inferior to the 15" max specs.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#170

Post by Pxtl »

avhon1 wrote: post #71
dawnerd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Primary reason it turns off is because its oled, and leaving it on would cause burn-in.

Sounds like a great application for an e-ink display. No burn-in, low power, and can always emit as much light as the keys on the keyboard do (by front-illuminating the bar when the keyboard backlight is on).

E-inks respond too slow for good touch feedback though so you'd want to have it be clicky or vibrate or something, which adds a moving part.
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