Ask HN: Does anyone use their MBP touch bar for anything?

Posted by hailwren on Thursday January 30, 2020 @10:49AM
from the ask-hn dept.

We've had these things for years, and Apple is forcing anyone who wants a new Macbook to adopt one now. So here I am staring at my new one wishing I had physical volume buttons. What can I do with the touch bar?

( 4 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Does anyone use their MBP touch bar for anything? by SavageBeast on Thursday January 30, 2020 @11:06AM (#22192380)

Literally the first thing I did was Settings|Keyboard|Touch Bar Shows Function keys and Fn key shows control strip.

Now the touch bar acts just like the setup I had on my 2015 MBP - but I do miss the physical buttons ( debugging in Eclipse burns F6 & F8 into your brain ).

If someone has found a legitimate use case where this silly widget is an enhancement to usability I'd love to hear it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Does anyone use their MBP touch bar for anything? by werm82 on Thursday January 30, 2020 @11:02AM (#22192336)

If you have BetterTouchTool installed, you can do a lot of cool stuff with the touch bar. I have a button that will run a shell script to spin up a local dev environment.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Does anyone use their MBP touch bar for anything? by diveintothe9 on Friday January 31, 2020 @01:45AM (#22199632)

The only function I've added to my touch bar that wasn't previously available was Screenshot, because I do a lot of snapshotting and screen recording, and I'd rather hit that than the stupid Siri button.

I wish there was a way to add custom app-specific shortcuts to the touch bar (maybe there is? I'm not sure). I use Sketch a lot for designing, and I'd love to have access to my document colors and text styles in the touch bar, but no joy.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Does anyone use their MBP touch bar for anything? by hntddt1 on Thursday January 30, 2020 @12:14PM (#22193092)

Used Pock app for app navigation and music control

[ Parent | on HN ]