8 ms·
Ask HN: No mechanical escape key in new Macbook Pros?
I came across this photo (potential casing for new MBP): http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2016/05/macbook_pro_2016_case_top.jpg
Notice the missing top row of function keys. People have speculated that this top row may be replaced by an OLED touch screen.
Comparing the above photo to the Macbook keyboard, it would seem that the top row includes the escape key: http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2014/11/retinamacbookkeyboard-800x484.jpg
If this is the case, any software developer that uses the escape key a lot may not be very happy.
- weinzierl 10y agoI'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 ` are accessible via the OLED strip.
- mattnedrich 10y agoI'm kind of in the same boat as you. I'm a heavy vim user, and a weird ESC key would really suck. I may be able to get used to ~ as escape, would take some getting used to though.
- serge2k 10y ago> OLED row makes me excited Can't imagine why. It sounds incredibly dumb. Probably have to live with it since no one else seems to be able to make a really high quality laptop. sigh.
- busterarm 10y ago> Probably have to live with it since no one else seems to be able to make a really high quality laptop. sigh. My solution to this has grown more and more to be "do everything on a remote box via SSH" and then it doesn't matter what laptop I use. I am a heavy Vim user, so this is easy!
- mattnedrich 10y agoThe MBP is nice b/c of the retina screen. Most laptops have crappy screens. In fact, I would go as far as saying that the MBP has the best screen by a decent margin.
- busterarm 10y agoI definitely have to agree, but they're getting serious competition on that front now. The Surface Pro is very close in ppi to the rMBP. Vendors are asking for this to compete with Apple.
- slededit 10y agoPPI isn't everything. The quality of the glass/plastic is also an issue. My DELL 4K monitor certainly has the resolution, but it also looks like I'm staring at a textured surface because they use cheaper acid etched plastic as the anti-glare solution.
- serge2k 10y agoIt's not raw power, although the responsiveness of the OS is a factor. It's the combination of a nice screen, good keyboard, best touchpad (crazy gap to #2), good battery life, and durability. All in a decently small/light package. edit: Surface book might be okay. I tried one of those razor laptops last year, it was okay. Not as good as the macbook, but not bad.
- weinzierl 10y ago>Rumors also suggest the OLED touch panel may be contextual, with buttons that change based on each app that's in use. [1] Having the most common functions available is something that sounds great in theory. The idea is not even new [2]. We will see if it works in practice. Personally I think I would like the OLED strip to show my Dock permanently, so that I could switch apps without reaching to the touch pad. [1] http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/macbook-pro/ http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/macbook-pro/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard The OLED strip will probably used
- weinzierl 10y ago>Rumors also suggest the OLED touch panel may be contextual, with buttons that change based on each app that's in use. [1] Having the most common functions available is something that sounds great in theory. The idea is not even new [2]. We will see if it works in practice. Personally I think I would like the OLED strip to show my Dock permanently, so that I could switch apps without reaching to the touch pad. [1] http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/macbook-pro/ http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/macbook-pro/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard The OLED strip will probably used
- gamedna 10y agothis is apple, be on the lookout for the new iVimClutch. (for those who dont know what a vim clutch is: https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch)
- weinzierl 10y agoI thought of this before. Funny that it is a real thing.
- blcArmadillo 10y agoHave you ever considered mapping 'jk' or 'kj' to Esc? This seems to be a somewhat common mapping from what I've seen looking at others' vimrc.
- cygned 10y agoI mapped <C-c> to <Esc> in all modes. I find that way better actually.
- weinzierl 10y agoI 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 uppI 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.
- eridius 10y agoI 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.
- weinzierl 10y agoI 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".
- tygorius 10y agoI 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 <esc> 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.
- miketwo 10y agoKarabiner (https://pqrs.org/osx/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.
- sotojuan 10y agoA benefit of this approach is that it's at the OS level, so it'll work even when in ssh.
- busterarm 10y agoI'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.
- mattnedrich 10y agoI actually use my laptop keyboard almost exclusively (my setup is MBP + external monitor). I have an external keyboard that I use every now and then, but I love the portability of being able to pick up and move.
- gamedna 10y agoEven though I have a full desk setup with keyboard, mouse, I do spend quite a bit traveling for work. Also, its very convenient to occasionally unplug and move into the living room so I can spend time with my family if i need to work late.
- busterarm 10y agoI have (and when I need to, carry around) a KBC Poker when I'm traveling and it was worked out well. I don't use the mouse for anything but web browsing honestly and if I'm doing that or working late, I'm not really effectively getting any work done anyway. I mean, I see the appeal though...it's just the typing experience on that keyboard sucks so much to me it's borderline-unbearable.
- wodenokoto 10y agoI am so used to my laptop keyboard, that even when I do plugin my real keyboard, I end up using the one on my laptop.
- mod 10y agoI have an old model-M, and I love it, but I don't use it often. I sit in a recliner quite a lot and that doesn't work. I did build myself an oversized desk recently, so probably I should get the M back out and have it on the desk for occasional use.
- gamedna 10y agoBack 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 the escape key was so engrossed with all things unix/linux that i gave up a month early. If the escape key is actually vanishing, I am completely confused. macOS is a unix derivative and apple has a boatload of developers. Why would they want to alienate us?
- dfsegoat 10y agoHave a blog / write up which chronicles your experiment? I always wondered if I, or anyone could do this when i first got my ipad.
- gamedna 10y agoYes, 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?
- devopsproject 10y ago> Why would they want to alienate us? I would imagine that most of apple's customers are not developers.
- 1_2__3 10y agoIt's really hard not to see this as just a continuous and perpetual dumbing-down by Apple of all its products, to the point of uselessness for essentially anyone who isn't an 80 year old grandmother who's never used a computer before and needs to use skype.
- kazinator 10y agoThe inventor of the escape character would be 96 today, had he not died in 2004 at 84. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bemer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bemer
- snowwrestler 10y agoOn the other hand, the touch bar might introduce opportunities for more sophisticated and flexible interfaces.
- 1_2__3 10y agoWill 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 feedback that'll change, but for now any attempt to move mechanical keys to touch-screens are, for me, a net negative just because of the basic facts of reality.
- mod 10y agoToy 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.
- 1_2__3 10y agoI 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 touchscreens ignores decades of history and basic physical reality.
- sboselli 10y agoWhat about the up and down arrows? There's only key there in your first image..
- snowwrestler 10y agoThe up and down keys are half-height without a spacer between them. Together they take up the same space as one letter key. That's the way it has been on Macbooks for a while. The change on that keyboard is that the left and right keys are now full height; they used to be half-height with a half-space above.
- goldenchrome 10y agoLooks like it will be configured like this: http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/557ae05d71ca1bfa4b8b4861-480/macbook.png http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/557ae05d71ca1bfa4b8...
- meidan 10y agoI use VIM. I will not be upgrading to the newest apple products. I think I'll phase them out instead.
- eridius 10y agoMaybe you should wait until the products are released before judging them. Also, a VIM user that actually uses the escape key? I don't know how you tolerate that. I bound jk to escape years ago, and in the rare case where I'm ssh'd into a machine that doesn't have my vim config I still find ^[ easier to type than escape (which is probably because I bound caps lock to control so ^[ is easy to type).
- wodenokoto 10y agoI don't use VIM a lot, mostly when committing stuff in git, so I'm quite naive about it. How would you get out of insert mode by writing jk? Or, how would you write jk in insert mode without exiting?
- eridius 10y agoAdd the following to your .vimrc: if !&insertmode inoremap jk <esc> snoremap jk <esc> endif (the insertmode bit can probably be dropped, but it's technically correct) With this mapping, typing "jk" in insert mode acts as if you'd hit escape instead (so it doesn't type the j or the k). To type jk in insert mode without exiting, you either wait a second after hitting the j (once it shows up on screen you're good) before hitting the k, or if you're impatient you hit another key and then hit delete before the k, e.g. "jj<delete>k". The reason this mapping is popular is because "jk" is extremely rare to type in insert mode; you usually only type it if you're typing out the alphabet, or if you're talking about how you map jk to escape. The only annoyance here is if you type j by itself, you don't actually see the letter show up immediately. This is because Vim is waiting to see if you're going to type a k. If you type nothing, after a second Vim will timeout and decide you're not invoking the jk mapping after all (and will then show the j). Or if you hit anything besides k then you're obviously not triggering the mapping. You can observe this behavior with any other multi-character mapping you might have as well (e.g. anything with <leader> or <localleader>).
- snowwrestler 10y agoApple could easily persist an ESC virtual button in the same spot. Or provide a user setting to do so.
- mattnedrich 10y agoI think they'll absolutely do this (assuming there isn't a physical ESC key). But, I think the experience would suck for users that are hitting ESC all day (e.g., vim users)
- snowwrestler 10y agoIf I were them, I would have kept the physical ESC and power keys at either end and fit the touch bar in between. They still could; the part in that picture might not be final. (It probably is though.)
- stuaxo 10y agoHm, how long until there are Linux drivers for this ?
- taurath 10y agoI 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.
- mod 10y agoThe 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.
- cauterized 10y agoBacktick. 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).
- taurath 10y agoNot as "much" of a problem I'd imagine as losing the escape key (at least for me). Maybe putting it somewhere else?
- a-no-n 10y agoIf there's no hackable non-Retina-like model with user-upgradable to 16 GiB of memory and dual SSDs, the MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) MD101LL/A will be the last MBP I buy. Overpriced, soldered-on memory is BS.
- stevep001 10y agoI 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-review-a-fine-heir-to-the-thinkpad-name/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/thinkpad-x1-carbon-re...
- lj3 10y agoLenovo 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.