As a vi user, I hate the touchbar and its escape "key". I sometimes find myself turning down the brightness instead of getting into command mode which is irritating.
I hear this specific complaint often; I wonder if people don't realize the hit area of the escape key is much larger than the key itself. On my 2016 MBP I can fire it from almost a centimeter from its left edge
I do wish there was some haptic feedback, and all my issues would go.
Touchbar has been great for scrubbing, provides much finder-grained control of both brightness and volume than the keys did (fine-grained sliders for both the laptop display and attached thunderbolt display).
Id happily agree that comfort-wise, I still prefer the longer-travel keys of the 2012-2015 era.
As a Vim user who occasionally uses a touchbar MacBook, I don't even think about the touchbar. Mainly because I don't use it for anything. Let me repeat that: nothing. It does not enter my mind. Until I hit escape and I'm still in text entry mode. Because the escape key didn't fire.
I appreciate the collaborator who sent this thing to me, so I have excellent field experience on which to base my decision to "nope, never" buy one of these.
I'm now using an early 2017 MacBook Pro 13" "Escape" (14,1 sans Touch Bar), with the 2nd-gen butterfly keyboard. My main workflow revolves around iTerm2, zsh, tmux, and NeoVim. Even though I have a real Esc key, I usually use Ctrl-[ as it's closer to the home row and faster for me.
Far more worrying to me is the butterfly keyboard in this scenario (for dev). The Ctrl, Tab, Return, and especially the A, J, K, D, and T keys get a lot of use and currently aren't tough enough to withstand constant usage. I've already had to replace the butterfly switch under the J key because one of the tiny clips that hold the switch in place in the corners snapped off. Fortunately I was able to blow the broken off piece out and prevent the key from going catatonic until I could replace it, but my left Shift key got a tiny speck of something underneath of it and is now refusing to register `:` half the time, which is incredibly frustrating for a heavy Vim user.
The non-user-replaceable battery is another annoyance. We all know that heat is the enemy of Li-ion batteries. I'm working remote in SE Asia, and even with office A/C it's very hot here. This laptop is a little over a year old, has never been used outdoors or outside an office, and it's already in "Service Battery" mode and shutting down at around 70% charge. This is completely unacceptable. I'm going to have to take it to the Genius Bar and be without my work rig for about 2 weeks if I'm lucky, and it goes without saying that I have a lot of user-centric settings and config enabled that would take me hours to replicate on a borrowed rig (even though I can clone my dotfiles and part of the config).
As Marco says in the article, developers are the biggest cohort of Apple's "pro" users. Apple needs to go back to the drawing board and make a truly pro keyboard that can withstand the rigours of touch typing and massive amounts of key entry, and can resist a very modest amount of dust.
We all know that heat is the enemy of Li-ion batteries. I'm working remote in SE Asia, and even with office A/C it's very hot here. This laptop is a little over a year old, has never been used outdoors or outside an office, and it's already in "Service Battery" mode and shutting down at around 70% charge.
Something sounds very wrong there. Unless you are regularly using it in areas above 35° C it shouldn't really matter.
Clarification: I have used this in rooms with no A/C, but to my knowledge it's never been in a room with temperatures above what Apple recommends as above normal range.
You could start using Ctrl-[ instead of the Esc key and see if that works better for you. The [ key is easier to reach, it's closer to the center of the keyboard. But sometimes using a different key is tricky, as we get our muscle memory used to a particular key position and after some point it's difficult to change that.
I personally also tend to use Ctrl-M instead of Enter and Ctrl-H instead of Backspace, for the same reasons. And some people map Ctrl to Caps Lock as it's also easier to find with your finger than the Ctrl key - it's a big key. I usually do this too.
That was my problem too but I discovered the Karabiner Elements app which lets you map caps lock to escape when pressed alone and to control when held down.
I'm with all the people who remap Caps Lock to be the Escape key. Works fine.
(Although when I have to use other people's Macs or my Win PC at home it's often hard to remember to use the Escape key instead - at least toggling Caps Lock isn't destructive.)
Speaking of vi and the touchbar, it took me an inappropriate amount of time to figure out why my terminal was sometimes changing colors while occasionally using vi..
