10 ms·

I'm still surprised that so many people are stuck on the Escape key but it's probably no surprise that the ones that are stuck are all developers using vi or em

I'm still surprised that so many people are stuck on the Escape key but it's probably no surprise that the ones that are stuck are all developers using vi or emacs. I love the Touch Bar and had no problem adjusting/remapping and find the utility of the Touch Bar for video and audio editing to be invaluable now. I wasn't sold on it before but, over the last year or so, I'll be really disappointed if they remove it. Adding the escape key back seems like a good compromise for both parties, imho.

TheRealPomax 6y ago
Or, you know, literally any app where `esc` is the "cancel and exit this dialog" key. Which is every Adobe application, all DAWs, etc. etc.
- dkonofalski 6y ago
  I don't see how that's a negative. The Touch Bar still has an ESC segment that works exactly the same as the button and literally no one in any of the companies that I've worked with that's not a developer has ever had an issue with it while simultaneously finding the Touch Bar far more useful than unlabelled function keys.
  - samatman 6y ago
    I'm glad Apple disagrees with you and is no longer making computers which lack a physical escape key. I got used to it pretty quickly, and I've had press-Alt mapped to Esc for many years. It was always annoying, and the 16" with a physical Esc is much nicer. Now all Apple has to do is add some haptic feedback to the damnable thing and I'll actually like it.
    - dkonofalski 6y ago
      I don't think they do disagree with me. I'm not suggesting that the physical escape key isn't a better option for people. I'm just responding to the person that said the Touch Bar was broken because it didn't include a physical escape key. It's not broken. It works exactly the same, functionally, as the physical key so there's nothing you can do with the physical key that you can't do with the virtual key on the Touch Bar. The physical key is just better because it's tactile and now usable for all the devs that rely on it.
      - samatman 6y ago
        I think Apple putting the physical escape key back indicates that they agree it was broken, relative to a virtual escape key. The only advantage to a virtual Esc is getting that piece of real estate if you don't happen to want one, and as has been pointed out elsewhere, Escape is an important affordance in macOS-land, even if you aren't a Vim user. The important report here is a process freezing both the UI and the touch bar, and therefore option-command-escape being unavailable to bring up force quit. That's obviously bad, and I would call it broken. Edge case but an important one! This is just a quibble about whether it's worse enough to deserve the moniker "broken", though. I'm not personally attached to that, just want to point out that it does in fact break an important action in the core vocabulary.
        dkonofalski 6y ago
        >I think Apple putting the physical escape key back indicates that they agree it was broken, relative to a virtual escape key. No it doesn't. All that it indicates is that there was a preference for it by part of their demographic. Again, developers are in the minority here. Most Macbook users don't care and it was an easy concession to make from Apple.
  - TheRealPomax 6y ago
    Except it doesn't, because there is no esc key. There's a portion of a touch sensitive monitor that may, or may not, have an active region that simulates an esc key, which you won't know without looking at it, rather than being able to rely on the fact that there's a key in the upper left that you can feel for without ever looking at your keyboard, in the knowledge that it always sends the one key code it has to. If this has never been a problem for you: nice! But it's been so much of a problem for everyone else, and they've spoke up about this so much, that Apple undid that decision.
    - dkonofalski 6y ago
      Yes, there is. Show me a situation where the Touch Bar wouldn't have the ESC button there. Additionally, if the position and location are that big of an issue, there is a setting that guarantees that the ESC key and FN keys are always on the bar at all times. There is literally nothing that the physical key does that the virtual key on the Touch Bar can't do.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Actually, that behavior is baked into the OS.
  - TheRealPomax 6y ago
    That doesn't bear any relevance to application UI frameworks that don't build on top of the OS's UI framework.
rozab 6y ago
On the contrary, I'd say the ESC key is even more important to normal consumers than programmers compared to, say, the backtick key. I mostly use it for coming out of fullscreen for youtube, netflix etc and I'm sure most consumers don't even know what a backtick is.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  You're probably right about the unpopularity of the backtick key, and it's too bad. I use cmd-` probably 1000 times every day. For me cmd-` and cmd-Tab completely obviate any need for Mission Control or any of the other 14 different mechanisms in MacOS that show you all your windows and let you click one with the mouse.
  - pier25 6y ago
    Same. CMD+Tab tells me everything I need to know. My dock auto hides and I only use it to open the downloads folder. Very rarely I can't find a window and I use a hot corner to show all windows of the space but it happens once a week at the most.
- dkonofalski 6y ago
  The physical key isn't what's important to consumers. The ability to back out and use the ESC function is and that's still there for everyone who has a Touch Bar machine.
rooam-dev 6y ago
I am still surprised that Apple doesn't give the option of non-touchbar. Why is that? A good compromise would be to have both options, imho.
- milkytron 6y ago
  By limiting the customization, it reduces the complexity of supply chains and thus reduces cost.
  - mirkules 6y ago
    So where are the savings? Certainly not passed down to the customer. Plus, Apple is not known for hardware cost-savings as being a primary factor in their key decisions.
    - milkytron 6y ago
      > So where are the savings? Apple is a business and prices its products based on demand. If people are willing to pay a high price, you bet they're going to charge a high price. The savings from not having many hardware variations on a single model are simply accumulated into their bank account. And they might not cut costs when it comes to the hardware itself, but they are known for having a limited number of options and customizations when it comes to hardware.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  I suspect nobody uses that entire row, so if you're not going to do anything with it besides an escape key, you may as well throw in something interesting.
  - rooam-dev 6y ago
    If that's the case where are the external magic keyboards with touchbars?
    - deleted 6y ago
arcticbull 6y ago
I've used the touch bar for years, and frankly, it's provided me zero value whatsoever. The only thing I use it for is occasionally adjusting volume or brightness but of course I can no longer do that without looking down at what I'm manipulating. Third party apps have totally ignored it. The physical escape key is the second useful thing in the entire function row, but hey at least it's got two useful things now (an escape key and a touch ID/power button), so that's a 100% increase! I went so far as to build a physical escape key -- #couragekey -- a few years back (just as a joke, but it does work) https://twitter.com/martinmroz/status/995003391314083840 https://twitter.com/martinmroz/status/995003391314083840 I just put in my order! [edit] also the #couragekey was a really fun project to put together, I think I'll write it up to commemorate a real escape key coming back.
- aweb 6y ago
  I was of the same opinion as you until I discovered Pock: it's a small tool that puts the dock (and optional controls) in the touchbar. This means I can get more screen real estate while keeping my dock accessible. Frankly I'm now pretty much onboard with the touchbar, except for the probably huge battery consumption.
  - gowld 6y ago
    Auto-Hide dock is easier to reach than touchbar.
    - pfranz 6y ago
      I realize a lot of people are big fans of hiding their dock. I find it annoying because there are too many moves instead of darting your eyes. When walking up to a random computer it's worse because I often find those people have moved the dock and I have to check each corner one at a time.
      - melq 6y ago
        I've had the dock hidden for so long I've almost forgot it existed. I do all my app launching and switching with spotlight and keyboard shortcuts. But just recently I was having a hell of a time locating the trash folder in the filesystem or in a finder window, and thought they might have gotten rid of it or something. Then I remembered the good ol' dock icon. I wouldn't mind the dock being visible when I'm using my large external monitor, but it just takes up too much space on a 13/15inch screen imo.
outworlder 6y ago
> and find the utility of the Touch Bar for video and audio editing to be invaluable now. See, the problem is that I rarely use the laptop's own keyboard. Only in cases where I'm actually on the go. If I'm at the office or at home, I'll have an external keyboard (and monitor). While the laptop's own display remains useful, the keyboard becomes awkward to reach. The touchbar, even more so. Now, if Apple's external keyboard had a touch bar, now that would be useful.
- dkonofalski 6y ago
  At this point, I would definitely use an external keyboard or even just an external Touch Bar (unless Apple releases mechanical keyboards with a Touch Bar). I kinda rely on it for media editing/scrubbing.
Hippocrates 6y ago
I personally use Vi and so do others I hear from (as in HN) but other than that it would probably never come up as an issue. For the record, you can remap Caps lock to Esc which is as good, if not better than escape. I use this on my iPad and other keyboards as well (even with the esc key)
- cpcallen 6y ago
  A bit tricky when I have Caps Lock remapped to Control, like any self-respecting emacs user!
  - kekumu 6y ago
    Do both! You can use karabiner elements to remap CAPS LOCK so that it’s ESCAPE when tapped and CONTROL when held.
  - blymphony 6y ago
    I also map my Caps Lock to Control, but don't forget that Ctrl + [ is the equivalent of Escape in vi/vim. It's a chord, but it ends up being much more convenient for me since the keys are both comfortably around the home row keys.
- kentosi 6y ago
  I think one of the main points is that you shouldn't have to.
- dkonofalski 6y ago
  I agree but, as I said initially, I only see this in the developer crowd. I just don't hear that type of criticism from any other segment in any of the companies I work with.
anbop 6y ago
The problem is most heavy computer users set themselves up with a proper ergonomic setup, i.e. external keyboard. And by not building the touch bar into external keyboards, they killed the entire concept of the Touch Bar, because any "pro" application has to assume that you may or may not have a touch bar and can't put essential functionality there. Which limits the Touch Bar to proper first-class support primarily in Apple first-party apps.
- mamon 6y ago
  Touch bar is stupid idea because it is so narrow,and located in such place that it is hard to see it clearly due to the angle. If they really wanted to add touch capabilities to MacBook they should have put touch display in place of TouchPad, like Asus did: https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-05-asus-zenbook-pro-15-screenpad.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-05-asus-zenbook-pro-15-scre...
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  I guess the actual, underlying problem is, the Touchbar is bad UX for a bunch of software engineers, but pretty great for most everyone else. Think about it – you lose some keys you never really had a use for anyway except as media keys, and you get almost analogue-ish volume and brightness controls, apps can give you context-dependent options that are really discoverable (which F-keys totally aren't) and can adapt to your feature use patterns and be a lot richer than static bindings on 12 keys. As a musician, you get a neat little slider – no replacement for a proper external controller, but it's always there when needed, and it can change its behavior dependent on the context. As a photographer, you get a multi-function slider in post that feels (to me) a lot more precise than any touchpad acrobatics I'm capable of. Plus, and most importantly by a long way, it makes emoji really usable on MacOS, and emoji are super, super important stuff, it's hard to overstate their value. Text-based communication loses a lot of emotional cues, that's really hard to get used to if you're used to mostly in-person communication or at least voice, and in my experience keeps causing small (or not-so-small) misunderstandings and microdose vitriol even among people who have been doing this for ages and ages, been socialized in it, aren't too keen on lots of face-to-face, and detest emoji with a passion. Those are things that make the Touchbar a pretty neat feature for lots and lots of people, even given its many "legitimate" issues (it tends to micro-freeze for some people, it isn't as precise as it could be, lots of apps use it in not-well-thought-out ways, it's very hard to use blindly, ...) But not having F-keys is so disruptive to a lot of deeply-ingrained software development muscle memory and UI conventions transplanted from other OSes and other decades that I guess it just wouldn't fly with this crowd in pretty much any shape and form factor.
danso 6y ago
I haven't had an issue with the Touch Bar, but only because 95% of my usage is through a connected mechanical keyboard; the 5% of time that I do use my laptop's keyboard + Touch Bar, I definitely do not enjoy it. I can sort of understand the potential appeal of it, especially in terms of customization. But even though the Touch Bar is 3 years old, am I the only one who is reluctant to invest time in learning it (this includes learning how to fully customize and optimize it) because it seems like the kind of feature that may soon disappear into obsolescence? It doesn't help that it's the sort of hardware feature that is literally only applicable to 1 of 3 computers I currently use. But unlike other Apple-pioneered hardware features (multitouch trackpad, built-in Touch ID), Touch Bar seems very unlikely to eventually become a popular cross-platform feature.
pfranz 6y ago
I do use vi, but I think it's more important that ESC is used to non-destructively dismiss a dialog. Like exiting fullscreen mode, backing out, or dismissing a warning--but not exiting without saving.
nl 6y ago
I too love the touch bar. For example I love that apps written to use (eg VS.Code) now have labelled buttons rather than imposing on me to remember strange function buttons.

TheRealPomax 6y ago

Or, you know, literally any app where `esc` is the "cancel and exit this dialog" key. Which is every Adobe application, all DAWs, etc. etc.

dkonofalski 6y ago
I don't see how that's a negative. The Touch Bar still has an ESC segment that works exactly the same as the button and literally no one in any of the companies that I've worked with that's not a developer has ever had an issue with it while simultaneously finding the Touch Bar far more useful than unlabelled function keys.
- samatman 6y ago
  I'm glad Apple disagrees with you and is no longer making computers which lack a physical escape key. I got used to it pretty quickly, and I've had press-Alt mapped to Esc for many years. It was always annoying, and the 16" with a physical Esc is much nicer. Now all Apple has to do is add some haptic feedback to the damnable thing and I'll actually like it.
  - dkonofalski 6y ago
    I don't think they do disagree with me. I'm not suggesting that the physical escape key isn't a better option for people. I'm just responding to the person that said the Touch Bar was broken because it didn't include a physical escape key. It's not broken. It works exactly the same, functionally, as the physical key so there's nothing you can do with the physical key that you can't do with the virtual key on the Touch Bar. The physical key is just better because it's tactile and now usable for all the devs that rely on it.
    - samatman 6y ago
      I think Apple putting the physical escape key back indicates that they agree it was broken, relative to a virtual escape key. The only advantage to a virtual Esc is getting that piece of real estate if you don't happen to want one, and as has been pointed out elsewhere, Escape is an important affordance in macOS-land, even if you aren't a Vim user. The important report here is a process freezing both the UI and the touch bar, and therefore option-command-escape being unavailable to bring up force quit. That's obviously bad, and I would call it broken. Edge case but an important one! This is just a quibble about whether it's worse enough to deserve the moniker "broken", though. I'm not personally attached to that, just want to point out that it does in fact break an important action in the core vocabulary.
      - dkonofalski 6y ago
        >I think Apple putting the physical escape key back indicates that they agree it was broken, relative to a virtual escape key. No it doesn't. All that it indicates is that there was a preference for it by part of their demographic. Again, developers are in the minority here. Most Macbook users don't care and it was an easy concession to make from Apple.
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  Except it doesn't, because there is no esc key. There's a portion of a touch sensitive monitor that may, or may not, have an active region that simulates an esc key, which you won't know without looking at it, rather than being able to rely on the fact that there's a key in the upper left that you can feel for without ever looking at your keyboard, in the knowledge that it always sends the one key code it has to. If this has never been a problem for you: nice! But it's been so much of a problem for everyone else, and they've spoke up about this so much, that Apple undid that decision.
  - dkonofalski 6y ago
    Yes, there is. Show me a situation where the Touch Bar wouldn't have the ESC button there. Additionally, if the position and location are that big of an issue, there is a setting that guarantees that the ESC key and FN keys are always on the bar at all times. There is literally nothing that the physical key does that the virtual key on the Touch Bar can't do.
saagarjha 6y ago
Actually, that behavior is baked into the OS.
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  That doesn't bear any relevance to application UI frameworks that don't build on top of the OS's UI framework.

rozab 6y ago

On the contrary, I'd say the ESC key is even more important to normal consumers than programmers compared to, say, the backtick key. I mostly use it for coming out of fullscreen for youtube, netflix etc and I'm sure most consumers don't even know what a backtick is.

dreamcompiler 6y ago
You're probably right about the unpopularity of the backtick key, and it's too bad. I use cmd-` probably 1000 times every day. For me cmd-` and cmd-Tab completely obviate any need for Mission Control or any of the other 14 different mechanisms in MacOS that show you all your windows and let you click one with the mouse.
- pier25 6y ago
  Same. CMD+Tab tells me everything I need to know. My dock auto hides and I only use it to open the downloads folder. Very rarely I can't find a window and I use a hot corner to show all windows of the space but it happens once a week at the most.
dkonofalski 6y ago
The physical key isn't what's important to consumers. The ability to back out and use the ESC function is and that's still there for everyone who has a Touch Bar machine.

rooam-dev 6y ago

I am still surprised that Apple doesn't give the option of non-touchbar. Why is that? A good compromise would be to have both options, imho.

milkytron 6y ago
By limiting the customization, it reduces the complexity of supply chains and thus reduces cost.
- mirkules 6y ago
  So where are the savings? Certainly not passed down to the customer. Plus, Apple is not known for hardware cost-savings as being a primary factor in their key decisions.
  - milkytron 6y ago
    > So where are the savings? Apple is a business and prices its products based on demand. If people are willing to pay a high price, you bet they're going to charge a high price. The savings from not having many hardware variations on a single model are simply accumulated into their bank account. And they might not cut costs when it comes to the hardware itself, but they are known for having a limited number of options and customizations when it comes to hardware.
arcticbull 6y ago
I suspect nobody uses that entire row, so if you're not going to do anything with it besides an escape key, you may as well throw in something interesting.
- rooam-dev 6y ago
  If that's the case where are the external magic keyboards with touchbars?
  - deleted 6y ago

arcticbull 6y ago

I've used the touch bar for years, and frankly, it's provided me zero value whatsoever. The only thing I use it for is occasionally adjusting volume or brightness but of course I can no longer do that without looking down at what I'm manipulating. Third party apps have totally ignored it. The physical escape key is the second useful thing in the entire function row, but hey at least it's got two useful things now (an escape key and a touch ID/power button), so that's a 100% increase! I went so far as to build a physical escape key -- #couragekey -- a few years back (just as a joke, but it does work) https://twitter.com/martinmroz/status/995003391314083840 https://twitter.com/martinmroz/status/995003391314083840 I just put in my order! [edit] also the #couragekey was a really fun project to put together, I think I'll write it up to commemorate a real escape key coming back.

aweb 6y ago
I was of the same opinion as you until I discovered Pock: it's a small tool that puts the dock (and optional controls) in the touchbar. This means I can get more screen real estate while keeping my dock accessible. Frankly I'm now pretty much onboard with the touchbar, except for the probably huge battery consumption.
- gowld 6y ago
  Auto-Hide dock is easier to reach than touchbar.
  - pfranz 6y ago
    I realize a lot of people are big fans of hiding their dock. I find it annoying because there are too many moves instead of darting your eyes. When walking up to a random computer it's worse because I often find those people have moved the dock and I have to check each corner one at a time.
    - melq 6y ago
      I've had the dock hidden for so long I've almost forgot it existed. I do all my app launching and switching with spotlight and keyboard shortcuts. But just recently I was having a hell of a time locating the trash folder in the filesystem or in a finder window, and thought they might have gotten rid of it or something. Then I remembered the good ol' dock icon. I wouldn't mind the dock being visible when I'm using my large external monitor, but it just takes up too much space on a 13/15inch screen imo.

outworlder 6y ago

> and find the utility of the Touch Bar for video and audio editing to be invaluable now. See, the problem is that I rarely use the laptop's own keyboard. Only in cases where I'm actually on the go. If I'm at the office or at home, I'll have an external keyboard (and monitor). While the laptop's own display remains useful, the keyboard becomes awkward to reach. The touchbar, even more so. Now, if Apple's external keyboard had a touch bar, now that would be useful.

dkonofalski 6y ago
At this point, I would definitely use an external keyboard or even just an external Touch Bar (unless Apple releases mechanical keyboards with a Touch Bar). I kinda rely on it for media editing/scrubbing.

Hippocrates 6y ago

I personally use Vi and so do others I hear from (as in HN) but other than that it would probably never come up as an issue. For the record, you can remap Caps lock to Esc which is as good, if not better than escape. I use this on my iPad and other keyboards as well (even with the esc key)

cpcallen 6y ago
A bit tricky when I have Caps Lock remapped to Control, like any self-respecting emacs user!
- kekumu 6y ago
  Do both! You can use karabiner elements to remap CAPS LOCK so that it’s ESCAPE when tapped and CONTROL when held.
- blymphony 6y ago
  I also map my Caps Lock to Control, but don't forget that Ctrl + [ is the equivalent of Escape in vi/vim. It's a chord, but it ends up being much more convenient for me since the keys are both comfortably around the home row keys.
kentosi 6y ago
I think one of the main points is that you shouldn't have to.
dkonofalski 6y ago
I agree but, as I said initially, I only see this in the developer crowd. I just don't hear that type of criticism from any other segment in any of the companies I work with.

anbop 6y ago

The problem is most heavy computer users set themselves up with a proper ergonomic setup, i.e. external keyboard. And by not building the touch bar into external keyboards, they killed the entire concept of the Touch Bar, because any "pro" application has to assume that you may or may not have a touch bar and can't put essential functionality there. Which limits the Touch Bar to proper first-class support primarily in Apple first-party apps.

mamon 6y ago
Touch bar is stupid idea because it is so narrow,and located in such place that it is hard to see it clearly due to the angle. If they really wanted to add touch capabilities to MacBook they should have put touch display in place of TouchPad, like Asus did: https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-05-asus-zenbook-pro-15-screenpad.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-05-asus-zenbook-pro-15-scre...
dividedbyzero 6y ago
I guess the actual, underlying problem is, the Touchbar is bad UX for a bunch of software engineers, but pretty great for most everyone else. Think about it – you lose some keys you never really had a use for anyway except as media keys, and you get almost analogue-ish volume and brightness controls, apps can give you context-dependent options that are really discoverable (which F-keys totally aren't) and can adapt to your feature use patterns and be a lot richer than static bindings on 12 keys. As a musician, you get a neat little slider – no replacement for a proper external controller, but it's always there when needed, and it can change its behavior dependent on the context. As a photographer, you get a multi-function slider in post that feels (to me) a lot more precise than any touchpad acrobatics I'm capable of. Plus, and most importantly by a long way, it makes emoji really usable on MacOS, and emoji are super, super important stuff, it's hard to overstate their value. Text-based communication loses a lot of emotional cues, that's really hard to get used to if you're used to mostly in-person communication or at least voice, and in my experience keeps causing small (or not-so-small) misunderstandings and microdose vitriol even among people who have been doing this for ages and ages, been socialized in it, aren't too keen on lots of face-to-face, and detest emoji with a passion. Those are things that make the Touchbar a pretty neat feature for lots and lots of people, even given its many "legitimate" issues (it tends to micro-freeze for some people, it isn't as precise as it could be, lots of apps use it in not-well-thought-out ways, it's very hard to use blindly, ...) But not having F-keys is so disruptive to a lot of deeply-ingrained software development muscle memory and UI conventions transplanted from other OSes and other decades that I guess it just wouldn't fly with this crowd in pretty much any shape and form factor.

danso 6y ago

I haven't had an issue with the Touch Bar, but only because 95% of my usage is through a connected mechanical keyboard; the 5% of time that I do use my laptop's keyboard + Touch Bar, I definitely do not enjoy it. I can sort of understand the potential appeal of it, especially in terms of customization. But even though the Touch Bar is 3 years old, am I the only one who is reluctant to invest time in learning it (this includes learning how to fully customize and optimize it) because it seems like the kind of feature that may soon disappear into obsolescence? It doesn't help that it's the sort of hardware feature that is literally only applicable to 1 of 3 computers I currently use. But unlike other Apple-pioneered hardware features (multitouch trackpad, built-in Touch ID), Touch Bar seems very unlikely to eventually become a popular cross-platform feature.

pfranz 6y ago

I do use vi, but I think it's more important that ESC is used to non-destructively dismiss a dialog. Like exiting fullscreen mode, backing out, or dismissing a warning--but not exiting without saving.

nl 6y ago

I too love the touch bar. For example I love that apps written to use (eg VS.Code) now have labelled buttons rather than imposing on me to remember strange function buttons.