It stands (presumably) for professional, so it seems very reasonable for professionals (in this case programmers) to discuss how useful it it for them. As I'm sure digital musicians are talking about how well it will work with logic.

> If you think Esc then I is the future of programming tools, I don't know what to tell you.

It's certainly not the complete future of programming, but it seems like we'll be in the command line and remoting into machines for a long time. It's condescending to write off those concerns as being "in the past."

Vi is not just the past. It remains one of the best ways to edit text, period. And it will probably continue this way long into the future. Why do you think so many IDEs come with vim emulation?

Just for the record, I use vim all the time on the new MBP and don't have any issues. I remapped Esc in vim ages ago, though. vim was not designed around the current placement of the Esc key.

What do you use in its stead?

For the past year or so I've been using the key sequence "fd", which I discovered from spacemacs. (I've actually copied a lot of spacemacs keybindings because I found them very ergonomic.)

Great tip! I've installed evil-escape in my emacs and now have the same binding. Quite useful.

Popularity isn't really a good argument.

It could either be because it's a good way to edit text, or because of inertia and extreme conservative nature of developers.

I made no claim about popularity. I did make a claim about productivity. Big difference.

> Why do you think so many IDEs come with vim emulation

I was referring to the claim that a popular choice amongst IDE makers meant it was a good idea.

Ctrl-C is equivalent to pressing Esc in Vim and you don't have to move your hand so much.

Ctrl is one of the keys that vim specifically tries to avoid.

Certainly by having modes vim has great keyboard shortcuts and avoid having to press combination of keys. However, for redo you have to press Ctrl+R, so that would indicate that Ctrl is not forbidden in vim. In this particular case, I find more confortable to move a little my fingers to press Ctrl+C than having to move my whole hand to the upper top of the keyboard to press esc. Also, it is nice that this shortcut works everywhere without having to remap your Donglebook.

> The world is not full of UNIX era programmers.

It is actually still full of *NIX programmers. What's your real point?

I guess buying a 3000€ device to use it as expensive xterm manager.

I work in a group in which nearly every developer has a MacBook Pro, and they are all used pretty much just for this. It's quite common. It's a cheap way of getting a relatively decent Unix workstation. We all use the terminal or iTerm2 for local development and work on remote Linux systems, and around half are vi or emacs users. The rest use a bit of Sublime Text or Eclipse depending upon what they are doing. The mac is useful for maybe 5% of each developer's work, otherwise a Linux box would be just as useful (I'm one of the outliers who uses Linux and BSD nearly exclusively.)

Certainly for our purposes, the new MacBook is pretty sub-par. All the lost connectivity options were used heavily. I doubt when the time comes around to refresh them they will be as compelling as they were in 2011-2012. I'll probably just get a stock Dell or HP and find it massively less frustrating. It's not like the old MacBook Pros didn't make compromises either, but now it's making so many its use is difficult to justify.

Don't forget that Finder can connect to sftp fileshares.

Would they be better off using KDE 5 to develop? Probably, but good luck getting your manager to sign-off on a linux laptop, especially when all the other devs use 3000€ devices to manage their xterm sessions.

So? If one likes the quality of the product, why not?

> If you think Esc then I is the future of programming tools, I don't know what to tell you.

Of course text editing isn't the future of programming, but when I can create and run macros as fast as I can think through a formatting change, an IDEs regex find/replace and refactoring menu with a dozen options irrelevant to the task at hand feels clunky and limited.

This device is not catering to the past, sure, but its also not catering to a large group of users the previous device did. It also seemed to have caught a lot of them off guard.

Why didn't they make the touch bar an option rather than force it on all users? they could easily have added it above the previous keyboard configuration.