Fn keys are heavily used in Intellij and Eclipse. Basically, that OLED strip is a "no go" for me. I'm trying to decide between buying Dell XPS 13 right away or waiting for XPS 15 refresh. Any other suggestions are welcomed.
New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
221–230 of 808 posts
Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you need a dongle or an USB-C to Lightning cable. Those exist. And so do any USB-C to any other USB-Plug cables. Considering that Apple revises their hardware builds about every four years, it makes sense to move to strictly USB-C now as two years from now, I'm quite sure no more peripheral will come out that has anything but USB-C. So within the next 2-3 years you'll have collected heaps of USB-C cables that will…
> Considering that Apple revises their hardware builds about every four years, it makes sense to move to strictly USB-C now This would make a lot more sense if Apple had switched the iPhone to USB-C as well. That way, you really could just use one cable for everything . Instead, you need three separate charger for your iPhone, Macbook Pro, and Apple Watch. Oh, and the iPhone comes with lightning-USB- A cables, which…
>This would make a lot more sense if Apple had switched the iPhone to USB-C as well
yes. it would have. And this is the actual problem there. Lightning is just another way of controlling their walled-garden around iOS and I really hate it for that reason.
But that's beside the point of the port choice of the new Macs: The phones always have a lightning port, so the cable connecting to them will always have a lighting plug on one end.
What they could have done is ship the iPhone with an USB-C to Lightning cable instead of a USB-A to Lightning cable, but then people would have been even more pissed as USB-C isn't that wide-spread yet and in-fact until yesterday was only supported by one single machine made by Apple.
Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
#223I dislike this post intensely. The opinion comes across as uncharitable, as the author probably has not used this Macbook Pro yet. How can you (alexeysemeney) be so sure? I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac. Everybody uses the computer differently, but I'm pretty sure this is not a deal-breaker for most. One could also argue that the touch bar might lead to innovative d…
Many common applications that developers use have many keybindings that heavily rely upon the Escape key (Vim for sure).
I'm a big Vim user and I honestly wouldn't mind too much if I were to just remap the Esc key to capslock.
Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many common applications that developers use have many keybindings that heavily rely upon the Escape key (Vim for sure).
The escape key can be right there on the capslock (option to be enabled in System Preferences -> Keyboard). Using Esc key heavily with its default location is not practical at all. As for the F-keys I think this is more of a problem.
I had to install a third party program to get that to work, do they let you do that now?
Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
#225I dislike this post intensely. The opinion comes across as uncharitable, as the author probably has not used this Macbook Pro yet. How can you (alexeysemeney) be so sure? I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac. Everybody uses the computer differently, but I'm pretty sure this is not a deal-breaker for most. One could also argue that the touch bar might lead to innovative d…
I was configuring a server while walking through the airport the other day (long story and I won't bore you with details) on my ipad. There is no control key on the ipad keyboard meaning that I could not save any files from the ssh terminal. It was not the greatest experience and I can definitely see these kinds of things happening on laptop now due to apples "courage". They seem to be gung-ho on breaking things that work perfectly in the name of "progress".
Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, but it seems they are already selling a USB-C to lightning cable. http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK0X2AM/A/usb-c-to-lightni... a.k.a the "lightning to thunderbolt" cable.
That might remove the dongle but is it any better? I now need either two cables, one to hook my phone up to my laptop and one to hook it up to my computer, or a new charger that accept USB-C but won't be compatible with most other devices out there.
> That might remove the dongle but is it any better?
Er… yes?
> I now need either two cables, one to hook my phone up to my laptop and one to hook it up to my computer
Except you carry one cable with you and the other one stays hooked to an eventual desktop computer, rather than having to carry around a cable and a dongle.
Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
#227I dislike this post intensely. The opinion comes across as uncharitable, as the author probably has not used this Macbook Pro yet. How can you (alexeysemeney) be so sure? I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac. Everybody uses the computer differently, but I'm pretty sure this is not a deal-breaker for most. One could also argue that the touch bar might lead to innovative d…
> I consider myself a developer, and I almost never use the Fn and ESC keys on my Mac.
ESC usage just off the top of my head: cancelling any dropdown (e.g. IDE autocomplete, browser autocomplete, Spotlight, quick file search in Atom/Sublime), cancelling any OK/cancel dialog (e.g. save as), the ESC + '.' sequence in Bash to get the last word of the last command.
I could map ESC to the caps lock key I suppose.
Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
#228I've had a good, satisfying run with MacBook Pros, but now I'm stepping off the Apple train. I understand that Apple is trying to go in a new direction with the new MacBook Pros, and I won't complain about it. I am now simply moving to an Arch Linux setup on an old Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 to continue living inside the Terminal.
I'm not suggesting you do this, for legal reasons blah blah blah, but putting together a hackintosh is pretty easy these days if you really like osx.
If you can run Linux not sure what's the ultimate benefit of OSX (from a pure development standpoint).
Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
#229Dramatic click bait IMO. You could really hack that touchbar to do some great productivity enhancements.
Maybe you could enlighten me to some of the possibilities. Besides a slider, I'm not really seeing much productivity enhancements that functions keys cannot do.
I guess you can have virtual function keys as well as buttons for specific terminals. It depends how locked down the SDK is - knowing Apple it'll probably become more extensible as time goes on. I imagine that when IDEs can integrate with it, you'll be able to get some pretty nice features.
You can also show stuff like CI status, notifications for IMs, etc.
Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
#230I was waiting for the new Macbook Pros as I need to buy a new laptop, and was going to give my old Macbook Pro (2014 model) to my wife. But given that they have nothing of value (I don't care about gimmicks like the new touch bar), I've decided to abandon Mac and go back to Linux. I'm just a typical web developer, running a bunch of virtual machines, and an IDE. Any recommendations? I saw the Dell XPS 15 for around £…
Good luck with HiDPI. It is very application dependent, so I would check what you typically use. From what I have tried and read, macOS handles HiDPI and multi-monitors much better than any other OS out there right now. I'm so used to HiDPI just working on my MBP that I never even realized it was an issue on the other OSes until I started thinking about switching.
> multi-monitors much better than any other OS out there right now.
No it doesn't. OSX in fact has a completely innane behaviour when a MBPr is connected to an external monitor. Meaning you have to mirror or put it in clamshell mode. You can't extend the monitor ontot he laptop screen. Works perfectly well in Linux for me.