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I'm a "developer" in the sense that I have developed things but I better not leave my day job. For me, at least, I thought the touchbar represented a HUGE boos

I'm a "developer" in the sense that I have developed things but I better not leave my day job. For me, at least, I thought the touchbar represented a HUGE boost to productivity WHEN I coupled it with BetterTouchTool. Whenever I would use atom/sublime, there were lots of handy key bindings that I could either not remember for the life of me or which were kinda annoying to press. Well, I decided to take a couple hours and dedicate that time to putting those on the touchbar with BTT. For me at least, it has been glorious. Now really handy options for code traversal are RIGHT THERE as buttons on the screen, and now I use them constantly. I understand that for real power users they would have already memorize the key bindings or would have re-mapped them, but for me this was a crucial feature to actually getting me to use them regularly.

crisnoble 10y ago
That sounds pretty cool, but I am concerned that I would become too reliant on the touch bar shortcuts. When I dock at my desk for the day, plugged into a keyboard and monitors, the shortcuts would be just out of reach. Working all day on the laptop keyboard and screen sounds like an ergonomic nightmare. I guess I will wait until there is a detached keyboard with touchpad built in.
- ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
  That's a good point. At work/home I've had setup with multiple monitors, but always using the laptop as the keyboard. I hadn't thought about the fact that if I develop muscle memory with this set-up, loosing it may be unfortunate.
Maert 10y ago
You do realise that you could've just printed out the shortcuts and have them nearby for a week? It's enough to pick them up. The problem with the touchbar is that it's not haptic, it moves your eyes from the screen and fingers from the keyboard.
- ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
  That's a fair point -- I think a lot of it too was that some of the default bindings just felt awkward for me to reach/would break the flow of my typing, so I never bothered with it. Again, though, I know I could've just remapped them to something I felt more comfortable. I take the point that the touch bar probably just provided that nudge for me to invest some time into this, but I suspect that the experience that I have with it would not quite have been the same. YMMV, of course.

crisnoble 10y ago

That sounds pretty cool, but I am concerned that I would become too reliant on the touch bar shortcuts. When I dock at my desk for the day, plugged into a keyboard and monitors, the shortcuts would be just out of reach. Working all day on the laptop keyboard and screen sounds like an ergonomic nightmare. I guess I will wait until there is a detached keyboard with touchpad built in.

ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
That's a good point. At work/home I've had setup with multiple monitors, but always using the laptop as the keyboard. I hadn't thought about the fact that if I develop muscle memory with this set-up, loosing it may be unfortunate.

Maert 10y ago

You do realise that you could've just printed out the shortcuts and have them nearby for a week? It's enough to pick them up. The problem with the touchbar is that it's not haptic, it moves your eyes from the screen and fingers from the keyboard.

ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
That's a fair point -- I think a lot of it too was that some of the default bindings just felt awkward for me to reach/would break the flow of my typing, so I never bothered with it. Again, though, I know I could've just remapped them to something I felt more comfortable. I take the point that the touch bar probably just provided that nudge for me to invest some time into this, but I suspect that the experience that I have with it would not quite have been the same. YMMV, of course.