In 3 years of work laptop use I don't think I've ever once encountered an app that actually provides useful enough controls to depose my default function controls of

1. Mission control 2. Brightness down 3. Brightness up 4. Previous track 5. Play/pause 6. Next track 7. Volume down 8. Volume up

After experimenting with all of the apps I use every day to see what controls they could provide, I ended up just disabling the app-specific touchbar controls entirely and going with my defaults for every app.

I know it's personal preference how everyone likes their own machine configured, but as someone who gets zero value out of the OLED display, it's frustrating how vastly worse an experience it is than than it needs to be. The touch bar is clumsy with its zero touch feedback, so that I'm always accidentally pressing it with my fingertips when using the number row, and it drives me crazy. It's so much worse than the function keys that even if they fixed the utterly broken keyboard mechanism I would never buy a touchbar Macbook. Fortunately, Apple is making it a really easy decision, since their display panels aren't even close to being the best anymore, their core components are perennially outdated and overpriced, and MacOS has long been neglected. What else is there? The touchpad? I just use a high-end gaming mouse because it's about a billion times more precise and reliable.

That sounds like Quicksilver from a long time ago, I wonder what took its place. I know Spotlight took a lot of the filesearch features, but the UI automation and macro functionality were some real powerful stuff.

I don't see what you're saying the connection is to Quicksilver, but I believe the modern replacements are Alfred and LaunchBar. I have licenses for both but ended up sticking with LaunchBar for my MacOS machines because I don't need the more powerful automation features of Alfred.

Alfred+Dash have been an amazing improvement to my workflow. Type in "torch batch" and suddenly you have all the docs for Pytorch's Batchnorm functions right there.

If you're accidentally pressing it when hitting the number keys, your finger positions must be way off. It's not like the number keys are thin at all. Regarding the gaming mouse, if all you use the touchpad for is point and click a mouse is a decent replacement - that goes for all touchpads. I'd like to see you do three-finger-right-swipe or four-finger-pinch on a gaming mouse, though. :P

I have my caps-lock key mapped to esc and that solves that issue- a bigger issue for me is not having volume keys available all the time.

One better: I have my caps-lock key mapped to control, then use the ControlEscape "spoon"[1] for Hammerspoon[2] to allow it to also be an ESC key. The insight is that "control" is held, but "esc" is momentary, allowing these functions to be overlaid. It works great, nary a hiccup.

Way beyond "fixing" the Touch Bar's lack of ESC, this is far and away my preferred usage now.

[1] https://github.com/jasonrudolph/ControlEscape.spoon – a plugin (aka "spoon") for Hammerspoon.

[2] https://www.hammerspoon.org/ – a fantastic UI event scripting and customization tool for macOS

And then you go to use another machine with a full keyboard... Frustration. I agree: mapping keys is a simple and easy fix. But, it's frustrating if you switch between machines. I literally cannot type on my MBP from work after using my fantastic mechanical keyboard all day. Jarring is an understatement.

I want a full, physical keyboard. That's it. I won't buy another MacBook if Apple continues to forcefeed that pile of garbage as the only option. I said this in another comment a while ago: people who like Touchbar don't type. They're point and click users. People who type for a living despise it. I realize there are outliers but that's a pretty accurate characterization.

To be clear: what I've described is not a "fix" – it's an unalloyed improvement. I use this configuration uniformly across all keyboards: control and ESC on the home row FTW.

Also, take your angry generalizations about TouchBar users elsewhere. Aside from the ESC key loss I'm fine with the TouchBar, and know quite a few competent touch-typist developers who really like it as well. It is very divisive, but please leave off characterizing others' preferences according to your own frustration.

And I really do understand your frustration with the keyboards. They're just not great, and the reliability problems are a disaster. The only silver lining is that there's pretty reliable info that Apple is switching back to scissor mechanism keyboards for its laptops this year. Doesn't help the rest of us stuck with the "bad" years keyboards, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, Karabiner-Elements has that option and it's great. There is something satisfying about smashing that ESC button sometimes though in some contexts. :(

I did the same, plus used Karabiner to disable the Touch Bar escape "key" and set the touchbar to only show volume, brightness, kbd brightness regardless of app running.

In that mode it's OK, but I still have to look down to mute the sound, which is inconvenient.

Or even play/pause buttons