8 ms·
Apple giveth, and Apple taketh away – the Escape key
- Animats 10y agoThe original Macintosh keyboard didn't have an escape key.[1] Or function keys. Or cursor keys. Or a numeric pad, though you could buy one as an accessory. You're supposed to use the mouse. [1] http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/128k2.jpg http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/128k2.jpg
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoYes, but in this enlightened era, we run Unix and recognize the importance of the CLI. Maybe not the best, but it's sure as heck better than the original MacOS.
- rcarmo 10y agoI used (and refurbished) a bunch of those. But I switched to the Mac full time because of UNIX, not when it ran cooperative multitasking hacks atop a 680x0 CPU.
- hashkb 10y agoCrazy Vim user here: caps lock is ctrl. jk or kj or fd or something like that is esc.
- geerlingguy 10y agoAnd to add a little more background/detail for those interested in that kind of remapping—from the Vim wiki: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
- jamesgeck0 10y agoOr you can have a crazy hybrid. A tap of caps lock alone is esc, caps lock held down with another key is control.
- prewett 10y agoCtrl-[, otherwise you get Vi Finger from reaching all the way up to Escape all the time. I don't even use they Escape key anymore except to cancel things like GUIs.
- mi100hael 10y agoI like having Escape in the upper left because I can just blindly whack at that corner of the keyboard. Hitting '[' with my pinky is much less reliable.
- rcarmo 10y agoThat key combo only works on US keyboards. Portuguese, for instance, doesn't have dedicated square brackets keys.
- rcarmo 10y agoThat key combo only works on US keyboards. Portuguese, for instance, doesn't have dedicated square brackets keys.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- untog 10y agoI'm very dubious of this bar being added to Macbooks. What % of apps are really going to make use of it?
- protomyth 10y agoThe 10.12.1 update would seem to disagree with you. http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/25/images-of-new-macbook-pro-leaked/ http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/25/images-of-new-macbook-pr...
- vegabook 10y ago99.99% This will be touted as the #1 reason to spend a few dollars to "upgrade" your apps.
- protomyth 10y agoI'm a bit more concerned that their isn't a dedicated power button. My Mac has froze a dozen times in the last year, and I'm pretty sure a soft button isn't going to be working.
- mtmail 10y agoMaybe for a hard reset there will be a new key combination. Like Ctrl+Alt+Del
- creshal 10y agoOr a tiny inset reset button you need a paper clip for, like on some tablets/smartphones.
- frandroid 10y agoI've ruined a laptop microphone that way once, thinking it was a reset button... :P
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoSure, there already is one: It's Command-Shift- .... Escape. Oh.
- DashRattlesnake 10y agoApple has created a revolutionary new UI paradigm for that: you can now beautifully reset your Macbook by letting its battery die instead of being forced to memorize some terrible keyboard trick. The power button is clearly an outdated technology, this new innovation is the future and we have to embrace it.
- WildUtah 10y agoCourageous. Revolutionary and courageous. http://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/courage/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/courage/
- 10y ago
- willtim 10y agoLenovo released an X1 Carbon in 2014 with a similar touch strip and backtracked a year later. Personally I'm glad they did.
- partisan 10y agoThis is enough of an example to make one wonder why they would go down this path. It makes me sad as I really do enjoy my MBP, but as a developer, these changes are making the hardware unusable.
- creshal 10y agoThe hardware was reasonably okay, but Lenovo's problem was getting software to actually use it. Which none did, because what Windows software developer cares about special hardware only found in a single high-end laptop almost nobody buys? Apple won't face this particular problem, due to their tighter control on the Macbook software landscape.
- benologist 10y agoThe touch strip is rumored to only be in the MacBook Pros so it could be a while before anyone really cares about it, like Force Touch.
- benologist 10y agoIf it wasn't for the touch bar all we'd be getting is a slightly thinner shell and a slightly faster previous-generation CPU, just as the PC industry starts getting backpack desktops, desktop GPUs in laptops, OLED screens, touch screens, removable screens that become tablets, VR headsets, external GPUs, backlit keyboards you can adjust individual key colors on etc. PC industry is definitely missing out.
- Lio 10y ago> backlit keyboards you can adjust individual key colors on Just out of interest but what, other than novalty, is the purpose of this? I've seen it on a Razer gaming laptop. Is it just an entertainment thing or is there some UX using this? [edit] this is a genuine question BTW and not a weak attempt at snark.
- triplesec 10y agoThe position of the shift-lock key is terrible for something as powerful as Escape, for most users, especially those with bear paws like mine. An accidental press can have grave consequences. There's a reason it's at the corner of the keyboard. And it's the one key everybody can find automatically.
- jfoutz 10y agoWait! No! Caps lock is for control! I like my mac, but i guess this is my last one. My hands are cold and sweaty, so they aren't perfectly reliable with touch devices. No escape key makes me sad. It might make Apple sad, but they'll probably just cry themselves to sleep on their giant piles of money.
- ihuman 10y agoYou can make caps lock both escape and control http://www.economyofeffort.com/2014/08/11/beyond-ctrl-remap-make-that-caps-lock-key-useful/ http://www.economyofeffort.com/2014/08/11/beyond-ctrl-remap-...
- jfoutz 10y agoThat, that is very clever. Ctrl when pressing chords and esc when used alone.
- rys 10y agoBeware that one of the tools mentioned in that link, Karabiner, does not work on macOS Sierra.
- rco8786 10y agoWow, thank you thank you.
- duaneb 10y agoUnless you trigger on control alone (e.g ctrl + ctrl). This is super frustrating.
- ihuman 10y agoIs that pressing just control, or pressing the real control with the caps lock key mapped to control?
- deleted 10y ago
- Yabood 10y agoI was looking forward to buying the new MacBook Pro, but now I'm not so sure. Lenovo replaced the top row on their Carbon X1 laptop with digital keys a couple of years ago, and the results weren't that good. They were hard to use and unpractical. Hopefully Apple's implementation will work better.
- Synaesthesia 10y agoHonestly bough how often do you hit escape on a mac? So having it as a digital key won't be the end of the world.
- egwor 10y ago1/ Cancelling a dialogue box 2/ vi 3/ Force Quit
- maratd 10y ago> So having it as a digital key won't be the end of the world. That's quite an assumption. What makes you think that'll be an option?
- xj9 10y ago>50x a day, probably. I practically live in Vim.
- jacobolus 10y agoDozens if not hundreds of times every day. And that’s just in the GUI. I’m not even a Vim user or anything.
- nostromo 10y agoI wish Apple would taketh away one of the modifier keys instead. They have Function, Control, Alt, Option, Command and Shift. Regularly I forget which one is which so I just start spamming them all. And I can never remember what ⌥ is supposed to mean.
- Synaesthesia 10y agoYeah and I hit fn instead of ctrl on macs because I grew up using PC keyboards.
- geerlingguy 10y agoIt's worse when you alternate between Apple's larger USB keyboard with numeric keypad (which has wider Control, Option, and Command keys) and the laptop keyboard (which jams in a fn key before those three), and your pinky gets some form of PTSD from hitting the wrong button!
- lisper 10y ago> They have Function, Control, Alt, Option, Command and Shift. And modifier chords (option-cmd, shift-cmd, option-shift-cmd). If you used all combinations you'd have 64 different modifier combinations. Insanity!
- chc 10y agoAren't alt and option the same thing, or have I been missing some nuance for several decades? BTW, I think ⌥ is supposed to look like scales, representing "option." That's how I've always remembered it, anyway.
- xbryanx 10y agoI have the CAPS LOCK mapped to the escape key, which is great for Vim, etc. However, there's one weird edge case problem. In After Effects the CAPS LOCK is the one quick way to speed up rending of animations, by disabling the render to screen option. It's oddly hard coded to that key specifically and seems difficult to remap to anything else. I know I probably represent 1 of 10 people world-wide who have this problem, but I'm sure there are other odd things hard mapped to the sad ol' CAPS LOCK key.
- 0x0 10y agoI wonder if the reason there is no corresponding Xcode for the iOS 10.1+macOS 10.12.1 release is that they want to hold the official reveal of the magic toolbar. Surely the latest Xcode macOS SDK will have some sort of APIs for configuring the display/graphics/icons on the magic toolbar. Sucks if you're developing for iOS, because unless you want to side-load beta versions of Xcode, you will need to choose between being able to debug on the device or being safe from the remote code execution bug in the JPEG decoder on anything less than iOS 10.1...
- geerlingguy 10y agoNot to mention it seems they're withholding a release of the Network Link Conditioner[1] that works with Sierra along with Xcode. There's currently no reliable method for limiting the entire Mac's upload or download bandwidth under Sierra :( [1] http://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/ http://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/
- mattbillenstein 10y agoThis stuff always brings me back to "there's nothing more simple than one giant button" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rocky1138 10y ago"Apple giveth" Did Apple really invent the escape key?
- geerlingguy 10y agoThey didn't have it on the original Apple keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Keyboard#/media/File:Apple_Macintosh_Plus_Keyboard.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Keyboard#/media/File:App...
- Lio 10y agoI believe that's a Mac keyboard. The original Apple I and II keyboards had an Esc key. http://www.hp9845.net/9845/history/comparison/images/closeups/apple2-top-view.jpg http://www.hp9845.net/9845/history/comparison/images/closeup... The modern Mac owes as much to NeXT as it does to the classic Mac. NeXT also had an escape key ...and the ctrl key in the right place! :) http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/NeXT_Computer_keyboard_66682.jpg http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/NeXT_Computer_keyboard_66682.jpg
- jablan 10y agoOf course not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esc_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esc_key You can also see it on original VT100 terminal keyboard.
- abc_lisper 10y agoMan. As a emacs user who doesn't use meta key, this is sad!
- Matachines 10y agoI'm really in need of a new Macbook and don't use Esc that much... but Karabiner/Seil don't support Sierra yet so I can't do Caps Lock -> Esc + Ctrl (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). That said, I have my own mechanical keyboard I use anyway so it's not that bad. I'll be the guinea pig for this new kind of model. Here in HN we can all say "I use X for Esc!" but this is going to be a problem to the myriads of developers and regular people that don't know about these tricks.
- rcarmo 10y ago"We have no escape", said one of my Mac-wielding colleagues. So true now. (Full disclosure: I've been writing at taoofmac.com for over 14 years now, and even though I get why Apple is doing this, still find it dumb because I live inside a UNIX terminal most of my time. I'm now considering switching to Linux as soon as I can find a decent mail client, because, like Jamie Zawinsky, I refuse to read my email in a browser, like an animal.)
- digikata 10y agoJust curious, what mac-only terminal email client do you use now? I imagine that most terminal email clients work fine on Linux. Or maybe I am reading something incorrectly from your comment?
- miloshadzic 10y agoI think he means that Linux email clients are not that good, and Apple Mail is pretty decent.
- inlineint 10y agoHave you considered Thunderbird?
- rcarmo 10y agoFleetingly, under the influence of a Martini. I have little love for it, and find Mail.app much more pleasant and efficient (not performance-wise, usability-wise). Geary looks the part, but doesn't act anywhere as close.
- ComputerGuru 10y agoI just gave up on Apple ever shipping you are MacBooks and received my custom order HP two days before they announced the October 27th event. My (magnesium unibody) ZBook is as slim as my retina MBP, has a higher-PPI display, also comes with a glass trackpad, has user-replaceable battery, 2x M.2 PCIe SSDs, and upgradeable ram. I was able to pay a bit extra and get it with a mobile Xeon CPU (E3-1545m with Intel's top-of-the-line Iris Pro integrated GPU) which is the equivalent of the i7 6920HQ only with more cache and better graphics, meaning I was able to buy 32 GB of ECC RAM for only $200. It has a 4GB nVidia Quadro and still manages to weigh less than my rMBP. The only thing that sucks is the noise. It's quite even with the fan running at its highest RPM, but the frequency of the resulting noise is very distinguishable and it has a tendency to rev up and down quite suddenly (and often). It doesn't help that there are two fans, one on each side, which turn on and off independently - meaning you can suddenly feel like you've lost hearing in one of your ears until you realize the noise level is imbalanced. I don't know if Apple will introduce Xeon workstations, but even if they did, I'm not sure I'm ready to give up my three USB 3.1 (non-C), three thunderbolt 3 (/USB-C), power, gigabit Ethernet, and 3.5mm ports in exchange for a more-pleasant audio profile. Did I mention I've been a faithful Mac user for over a decade?
- visionscaper 10y agoWon't you miss macOS? It is not just about the hardware, it is the combination of the macbook with the OS.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- curiousgal 10y agoHackintoshs are a thing.
- ylhert 10y agohackintoshs are a giant, giant pain in the ass. I've been building hackintoshs since the close to the beginning of that scene (2009 or so) and have built around 5-6 hackintoshs, as recently as 3 months ago. It always has been and always will be a sucky experience that is a pain even for people who know what they are doing, ESPECIALLY for laptops. Most people who are technically inclined are better off just going to *nix
- NuSkooler 10y agoThis business about the caps lock key being "useless" has been very puzzling to me. As someone who learned how to property type, I utilize the key quite a bit -- especially when programming.
- cm2187 10y agoFor Excel users, a shortcut that I think few people are aware of. When editing a formula, select part of the formula, and press CAPS LOCK+F9, it will evaluate the value of the selection. ...the CAPS LOCK is not that useless!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mcphage 10y agoWhy wouldn't the bar have a software escape key when showing function keys?
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoApple, stop removing things we need and replacing them with BS! Esc is an important key, and I don't need less modifiers on my keyboard (I actually need more - i3 takes up a good bit of S, and Emacs uses CMS: I could do with a Hyper and an Fn to make things less cramped), and while Esc is important, it doesn't deserve the same kind of prime placement as Ctrl does unless your a vim user. I guess swapping it to Ctrl and swapping control to Capslk could work, but Esc really should be bound by default.
- pryce 10y agoApple might have made some missteps lately, but they're not stupid. The point of the "magic" toolbar is to help desktop users finally leverage the useful things you can do with contextually aware keys/controls, which is more in line with how humans approach things, and a massively under-recognized part of the reason that iPads are so much easier for non-computer people to use than PCs or desktops. See that 'cancel' button in the screenshot? That will be the escape key, under basically all circumstances that you would want an escape key. Here it says "cancel" which is more descriptive and is exactly in line with the language used on all the buttons and dialogues the user will see on the screen. "Cancel" is what it actually does. "Esc" isn't. Especially if the user is currently in a terminal, or VIM, I would expect the key to show the 'Esc' label and continue as normal. Under bootcamp, or under older macOS applications that don't attempt to interact with the Magic Toolbar API, I would also expect that area to show the 'Esc' key. I'm looking down while typing this on a Microsoft keyboard and I see 5 giant "My favourites" buttons and some weird "star" button, and a calculator button, all of which I have never used, and which sit above the mouldering function row which again is used fairly infrequently by me, and basically never by my family members. That is not how to design an interface.
- tjbrennan 10y agoI feel like I'm the only person who uses Caps Lock. When I learned to touch type, I was taught to use the shift key on the side opposite the letter being typed. When typing more than two capital letters in a row, I'd rather hit Caps Lock than paddle my pinkies back and forth. It's a hard habit to break.
- frb 10y agoI just realized that there are still four keys on the bottom left side (next to space). Until now this used to be: Fn, Ctrl, Option/Alt, Cmd Since Fn is obsolete now, due to the lack of F-keys, it makes me wonder what the most bottom left key is. Maybe (hopefully) they moved the Esc there.
- Steeeve 10y agoI use an external keyboard with my mbp mostly, but I use my escape key more regularly than all my F-keys and the fn/command buttons. I really don't think I'd buy a laptop that was missing what I consider to be a key component like that. I'm sure there's a contextual variant, but there's a pretty big difference between a tactile button and whatever haptic OLED nonsense that Apple put up there. This might be good for their consumer target audience, but I don't think it's good at all for their main proponents - techies and techie students. I'm very surprised that this issue didn't pop up internally. I wonder about their internal culture if this kind of a design went this far.
- akohlbecker 10y agoRemapping Caps Lock to ESC at the OS level is not a viable proposition for international users. Source: am French with an AZERTY keyboard, we need Caps Lock to make capitalised accented letters, such as in "À bientôt !"