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.

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".

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.

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.

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/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard

The OLED strip will probably used

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!

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.

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?

I would imagine that most of apple's customers are not developers.

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-re...

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.

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.

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.

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.

A touch control there could present a more intuitive interface--tap the control you want, then use a touch slider to adjust with great precision.

Another idea I saw in a blog post was to put a scrubber control there during video editing. Currently the trackpad has to serve double duty controlling the features of the application, and controlling the scrubbing of the content.

The function keys are a UI mess. Each serves double or triple duty, and the duties sometimes change with OS releases. For example, the Dashboard key on my Macbook Pro no longer activates the Dashboard.

This is just like the situation on smart phones when they all shipped with physical keyboards. Each tiny button on my Blackberry had at least 2 different functions. As Steve Jobs said, "we solved this problem with a bitmapped screen and a pointing device."

Anyone with a child that has access to a tablet can tell you that touch-input is succeeding.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bemer

They still could; the part in that picture might not be final. (It probably is though.)

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.

That's used in markdown and ES6 pretty commonly.

Losing that key is a problem for me.

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).

How would you get out of insert mode by writing jk? Or, how would you write jk in insert mode without exiting?

  if !&insertmode
    inoremap jk <esc>
    snoremap jk <esc>
  endif

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>).

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.