I miss the escape key.

I also like that volume and brightness are both sliders—I find the gesture of tapping the volume on the Touch Bar and dragging my finger up or down in the direction I want better than pressing a button a bunch of times until I’m at my desired volume. There are other things I like about it (and others I don’t).

I think it’s ok to like aspects of the Touch Bar and dislike others—it is possible to iterate to something better by being specific in one’s critique about what is good and what isn’t rather than just tossing the whole thing out (which is personally what I’d like to see...and maybe I’m in the vocal minority here).

I like the touchbar. I don't love it, but I like it and use it. For a Mac at least, if I were choosing between two otherwise-identical laptops, and one had the touchbar, and one didn't: I would choose the touchbar version.

I'm a longtime user of vi keys. I use them in Emacs Viper, vim in a pinch, and everything I can that uses readline. As such, I use the ESC constantly and I truly don't understand why people find it such a problem for ESC to be on the touchbar. It's just a slightly different feel but since it's a reach anyway, having a low-effort key there works for me. I don't know if I'd call it better but it's definitely fine. I've been using a touchbar Mac for all work for at least two years (I'm on my third--I don't remember when I got my first but it was around then) and it just isn't an issue for me.

On the other hand, since I use an alternate keyboard layout (Dvorak), it's quite nice to be able to put an input method switcher on the upper right of the touchbar that displays the current layout and allows me to toggle it. It was critical for years to be able to do this just to be able to practically use Yubikey hardware tokens, for example.

I also like having a screenshot button with an actual icon where I want it and to discard some of the control locations of the hardware function keys. Similarly having a lock screen button next to the fingerprint sensor is useful.

This makes the touchbar a bit better than function key buttons for me. Of course I could remap or reassign function key buttons; but for me function keys are infrequently used, so the icons and being able to create my familiar and preferred layout is a help. I use a different platform with function key buttons for a personal laptop, and while I have a button for ESC the rest of the function keys are comparatively less useful to me.

I found a way to learn to like it by using BetterTouchTool, which makes it more like a static customizable screen instead of the modal aware screen they marketed it as.

It gives me (always in the same place), currently playing song in Spotify with << || >> controls, weather tappable to see forecast for current location, a scrollable emoji keyboard, battery display, and standard brightness volume controls. Ctrl and Alt give me other modal contexts. All of those are nice for interacting with my host OS even if I'm, for example, working inside a VM at the moment.

Edit: it also prompted me to map escape to capslock, and now I wish that were default everywhere.

Edit2: having a scrollable emoji keyboard handy is honestly awesome, since I do most of my SMS messages through my computer.

I'm curious too. Anecdotally, I've never seen anyone use it for anything (I work in an office where Macbooks are standard issue). I think when I first got it I dicked around with it for 5 minutes, changing the colour of my terminal using the hue slider, and it was cool, but I haven't used it since. It just feels like a sales gimmick that serves no real purpose except to look fancy in an ad.

As a heavy vim user, I can’t live without escape key. One Of the fast way to alienate an entire userbase. I know people sometimes map cap lock but my brain is not conditioned to bimodal action and I don’t want to be tied to a certain specific keyboard layout, not to mention the pain to overwrite muscle memory.

So the escape key is there on the Touchbar.

It is always the same size. It never moves. It is always there.

And because the keyboard is already pretty thin the difference in feedback isn't that significant.

If it's always there, why not just shorten the touchbar slightly and put a physical key instead to get that sweet haptic feedback?