I'm always surprised when developers don't talk about the F keys in their reviews of the new MBP.
I mostly agree with the author regarding the escape key, the touch bar isn't really a problem in that regard, it still works and I got used to "pressing" it on the touchbar really quickly.
I really really miss physical F keys though. I spend a lot of time debugging (either in the Chrome debugger or in IDEs) where pressing F-Something seems to be the norm to step into / step over. The lack of feedback makes it a lot harder to use these keys repeatedly (in my experience anyway). I know I could change the keys but...
To be honest, that's the one thing that really bothers me about the new machine, I got used to everything else pretty quickly. I should note that I was forced to switch to the new model (my 2014 MBP was stolen). I didn't want a new machine, wasn't happy about getting one and started using it in the worst circumstances which probably didn't help me "learn to love the touchbar". Insurance paid for the new machine so price wasn't an issue for me.
I don't think it's an abomination or anything, I just never find it better than a normal keyboard with F keys (I don't do video editing or anything where a timeline might help me).
Other developers who use the touchbar MBP, do you not miss the F-Keys ? Have you changed the keys you use to debug ?
This bothers me as well. I also have issues with the esc key though. Apparently, I tend to rest my finger on it without noticing (I had no idea). So my subconscious experience with this new laptop is that it seems quite neurotic, constantly closing windows in front of me for no apparent reason, until I discover my finger on the touchbar.
Yep. I'm right there with you. I thought the new mac had an issue loading webpages. Turns out I was involuntarily cancelling navigation with ESC all the bloody time.
It's particularly bad for those of use that run Windows/Visual Studio from a Mac. Microsoft products are historically heavily dependent on the F keys with well known conventions (F1=help,F2=rename,F3=find/next,etc).
Well, my experience is the opposite: while using the new MacBook I realized how infrequent I was using the function keys. The only times that I noticed the "missing" function keys were when I tried to open up the web developer console (F12), or rename a file (F2). I did see Apple's rationale here: ordinary users won't miss them, given I, being a developer, didn't miss them either.
But unlike you and the OP, pressing the Esc key did affect me. I couldn't completely get used to the soft key even after using it for more than one month (currently). Every time I try to press Esc, I'm a bit hesitant. The inertia was higher than I expected. So I can't agree with the phrasing that "there is no justification for the apparent panic." The annoyance exists and I'm the living proof.
But on mac to open Developer Tools you are using Cmd + Opt + I or Cmd + Shift + C and to rename a file Enter key is used. There is almost no use for F-keys on macOS other than volume and brightness controls. I don't have newest MBP but on daily basis I am using 60% keyboard without F-keys row and very rarely have to go to F-keys layer even on Ubuntu and Windows.
General macOS users don’t have a need for F-keys, true. But the people that use F-keys, typically use them frequently. In my IDE, some shortcuts use F-keys. I use them regularly.
You can re-map the Escape key to Caps Lock. I bought the new MBP and got used to this. Although I returned it later and went back to my previous machine, I still use Caps Lock as Escape.
I'm using Karabiner Elements on Sierra.
brew cask install karabiner-elements
Edit: I also believe it causes less strain on my fingers.
Oh wow. I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier! As a Vim user I've always been told it is good to swap Caps Lock and Esc, yet I haven't actually tried it due to my laziness. Probably now is the time.
If a keyboard doesn't identify itself as such (I have a bluetooth keyboard that does this), you need third-party software to do it. The built-in Apple functionality only works on keyboards that say they're keyboards.
What for? I don't know a single F key shortcut. People say debugging, which seems fair enough. I guess I've always found the mouse-based controls sufficient to use the Xcode debugger.
Apart from the debugger, what do people need the F keys for? Are people really debugging that often?
I use a hell of a lot of keyboard shortcuts, mind you. But none of them are F keys.
A pianist that doesn't use some keys is limited in the music they can produce.
I can write exactly the same code as you without using shortcuts.
I think the advantage is that I don't have to learn completely arbitrary lists of silly little keys to press, and I can keep my brain-space for useful things.
Respectfully, the point of keyboard shortcuts is that they are remembered in your hands, not in your brain. This is the main reason most of these commenters reject the Touch Bar: lacking tactile feedback for button position, it seems like it would be difficult to develop "muscle memory" for a Touch Bar function key.
You can add custom programs to the exception list and F keys would be always shown. It's even better because you don't have to press fn key. That functionality is by default.
Xcode debugger looks pretty nice on touchbar IMHO. It would be great if other debugging tools catch up.
You already had to hit the Fn key to make the Fn keys function, correct? The defaults were the brightness, volume, etc settings. You do the same thing and they all appear on the Touchbar. Zero change in usability there.
Generally I think most devs who use MacBooks disable that option (making it so that you have to press fn to get the standard mac functionality) so that they have better access to the Fn keys. I will echo the sentiment, that there's something nicely tactile about key presses that's missing from the touch bar. That being said - I do half my work on monitors using an external keyboard/touchpad anyway, so it's really not the worst thing in the world.
Interesting that you mention this. I was tempted to buy a new MBP hoping that I could map the touchbar to debugger functions - I can never remember which F key is which. Little icons would be amazing.
Is it not possible to make the touchbar work with IDEA? That would be a major disappointment.
Even better, System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> Function Keys; and select the app in which you want the function keys to show up by default. e.g. IntelliJ Idea.
The good thing that can come of this would be the resurgence of the Linux desktop. Apple just crossed the line for me (<32GB, no SSD upgrade, messing with the keyboard). I'll miss the almost perfect trackpad, but there's no way I'll support these choices.
Historically, the side effect this tends to have is that a lot of programmers flock to a new platform but bring the way they use and write programs with them. Fifteen years ago we ended up with CORBA- and Window Registry-like components bolted on top of Linux desktops. On the other hand, seeing how nowadays the Linux "community" is mostly a bunch of big cloud, automotive and IoT/vaporware companies, this could be the closest the Linux desktop has to salvation.
So far, the attempts to bring elements of the OS X experience to the Linux desktop have been very... cargo cult, in the absence of a more forgiving word. Fetishizing design choices and simplicity has made it very unpleasant to deal with a modern Linux system. Many users of tiling-wm-and-terminal-only desktops don't do so "just" because it's the most efficient option, they do it because the alternatives are horrifyingly bad.
I wasn't aware the Linux desktop needed salvation. Maybe it needs salvation for non-technical end users but it's good to excellent for end-users whose primary use involve actually using Linux for what it's good at which is basically being a fully open OS and IDE for software and other engineers.
It has been exactly two days since the last time I had to dig down and figure out what broke in PulseAudio this time. Things are certainly bad for non-technical users, but those of us who write Linux software for a living don't have it much better, either.
Do you know why it breaks? Because Ubuntu 16.04 just works on my laptop. Things that require one-time technical setup: Function key (screen brightness) and Optimus/bumblebee. I also set up touchegg because Unity hates multi-touch trackpad. But since initial setup I never have to touch anything again, and can upgrade everything via Software Update.
I would say it is no better than Windows at all (since you also need to install correct driver on Windows).
Cynically, I'd say it breaks because the only mistakes that we live with, try to work around or fix are the ones made no later than the mid-90s. Everything else, we live with for a while, then boldly proclaim that they're outdated, junk from another age, no longer appropriate for a modern system and then promptly rewrite -- so unsurprisingly, a lot of components of a major Linux desktop are basically beta-quality and/or in a continuous state of flux.
Look at the Gnome 3.22 changelog. It lists things like support for multiple renaming, being able to set alarms for events in Calendar and seamless photo sharing via Google Photos and email. I remember being excited about all these features (except Google Photos, for obvious reasons) when I was using Windows. 2000. I was using Windows 2000.
That's why we're rejoicing that we'll soon have ASLR in all mainstream distros and support for a display server/compositor where windows can't snoop on other windows is just around the corner, while Microsoft is perfecting call-flow integrity and has had a proper compositor since the days when we were barely able to bolt our applications on top of an X11 compositor.
Edit: Non-cynically: most of the breakage happens because the level of complexity involved in a most modern technologies is way over the level that can be meaningfully managed by a community. systemd, xdg-everything, they're all very useful tools, but only a handful of people can properly use them, and it doesn't help that so many of them work for Red Hat and aren't exactly transparent about a lot of things. This breeds mistrust and brings about a lot of unjustified criticism along with the justified one.
As for why PulseAudio in particular keeps breaking, I'm not familiar enough with its source code to say. My problems revolve around things like randomly deciding to use another output device. I work around it by not using it, really. Every couple of months I take KDE and Gnome for a ride, they keep breaking, I open up the page of my local Apple dealer, I gaze incredulously at how much money they want for that hardware, close the page, pacman -Rcs plasma-meta and get back to WindowMaker.
I couldn't have said it better. The truth is, all my life, I wanted a Linux desktop that looks beautiful and just works. Simply, stupid, works. No magic involved. I work with Linux remotely almost everyday. I love to tinker, I love to learn - but it must be my choice what to tinker with and what I am going to learn next. I want to play with things that make me happy and give me satisfaction. And constantly maintaining my system and googling around for solution is not one of them. I tried... Crom help me, I've really tried. After yet another failure I just felt extremely disappointed and moved back to Windows at home. At work I am using MacBook Pro (previous one) and I am very happy about it - like it better than Windows. Honestly, OS X desktop is the best what happened to me so far. My last Linux desktop adventure happened few years ago, though, so maybe, just maybe, it got better recently... I still have hope, maybe there is some windows manager out there, but I'd need to thoroughly evaluate it on some spare machine before moving forward with it as my main desktop system.
I reluctantly decided that my MacBook days were over with these 2016 machines. But moving to linux was a huge step. So I bought a $360 2011 ThinkPad W520. A quad core laptop (with 32gb ram capacity). To experiment. Well, it was a dream machine, so now I'm using a quadore ThinkPad p50 (xubuntu) (with NVIDIA graphics). This is a great experience. It runs VMware way better than macos, and the keyboard ....
I've read about i3 several times over the past few years but finally checked it out a few weeks ago, and it fits exactly what I've been looking for in a Linux desktop for so long.
All I've ever wanted from Ubuntu/Gnome/KDE/XFCE (at least while developing) was the ability to launch programs easily from the keyboard, to tile windows in various configurations, and to manage virtual desktops.
i3 makes all of this easy with an incredibly simple and logical set of keyboard shortcuts. To anyone thinking about trying out i3, the learning curve isn't as bad as it seems, especially if you use a distro like Manjaro-i3 that can take care of some of the harder parts for you.
It's funny how much I think about the trackpad when I consider leaving apple. Seems like a a stupid reason when you tell non-apple users, but seriously, everything else feels so primitive in comparison.
Macs took over some of the developer space that Linux laptops used to be in. As a usable Unix environment with excellent hardware, it's a solid investment.
Me too. I wanted to move to a quad core. I was ready to get the new 15" but 16gb? My son has a hand-me-down 2010 MacBook Pro with 16gb. Anyway now I have a P50 quad core, with a 95whr battery, 7w idle power consumption, expandable to 3 HDD, two of which are as fast as the Mac, and a keyboard which is ridiculously good. It runs xubuntu. And I got change after selling my 18month old 13" MacBook pro. reality distortion bubble has been popped a bit.
With only a slightly smaller touchpad, Apple easily could have included a row of function keys, which are half height anyway. Then the touch bar would either be additive, or ignorable depending on one's attitude. But the trade-off makes it painful.
I don't believe that the fundamental issue can be fixed. Ironically "Touch Bar" is something you can't feel when you touch it. Real physical buttons guide your finger to the correct location if you miss them slightly. "Touch" buttons don't.
To fix that, one would need to rework the whole OS and applications in such way that they don't use F-keys at all, but rather something else.
So, fixing Touch Bar means rethinking OS and application shortcuts.
I don't think average users really use F-buttons that much, but we developers generally do.
if there was even a way to just have the f-keys on all the time by default, that would have helped. Last I looked, that was not an option - you needed to hold down the fn key (or control?)
The older macs, you could have f-key 'default' with the other options activated by holding the FN key, or reverse it, so that the brightness/etc were default, and f-keys activated by holding down the FN key.
There is no option to just have f-keys defaulted, with other touchbar stuff activated by FN key. For people who simply want standard f-keys as default all the time (like you could have in the previous macs), there is no option right now.
I mostly agree with the author regarding the escape key, the touch bar isn't really a problem in that regard, it still works and I got used to "pressing" it on the touchbar really quickly.
I really really miss physical F keys though. I spend a lot of time debugging (either in the Chrome debugger or in IDEs) where pressing F-Something seems to be the norm to step into / step over. The lack of feedback makes it a lot harder to use these keys repeatedly (in my experience anyway). I know I could change the keys but...
To be honest, that's the one thing that really bothers me about the new machine, I got used to everything else pretty quickly. I should note that I was forced to switch to the new model (my 2014 MBP was stolen). I didn't want a new machine, wasn't happy about getting one and started using it in the worst circumstances which probably didn't help me "learn to love the touchbar". Insurance paid for the new machine so price wasn't an issue for me.
I don't think it's an abomination or anything, I just never find it better than a normal keyboard with F keys (I don't do video editing or anything where a timeline might help me).
Other developers who use the touchbar MBP, do you not miss the F-Keys ? Have you changed the keys you use to debug ?