It's the worst. I constantly hit mute instesd of backspace.
Changing the volume or brightness is a complete pain now. It used to be just tap the key a couple of times and that was it. I would do it as a reflex without interrupting the work I was doing. Now I have to look at where the 'button' is, and then tap and slide. Completely awful.
Open the System Preferences app. Select the Keyboard option (third row, sixth item) On the first tab (also called Keyboard), locate the dropdown for "Touch Bar shows" and choose "Expanded Control Strip".
- Their “Customize Control Strip” sheet provides an arbitrary subset of volume buttons, which don’t include the ones I want. (Specifically, separate volume buttons and not “button that shows slider first”.)
- Previously I was very accustomed to feeling for the volume buttons, and even using modifier keys for very fine-grained volume changes. With default Touch Bar keys, this is basically impossible. It is sort-of-OK with BetterTouchTool customization but it took me awhile to find a combination that I liked. And, still not as good as the original volume/modifier keys.
Is there any way to disable the fixed `esc`? I could just ignore the touch bar, except for that. It haunts my vim experience and my attempts to use full-screen (which `esc` exists by default), since apparently my left little finger tends to rest there without my realising (maybe because I'm a vimmer?).
Furthermore, one of its main added features — the ability to do gestures that keys can’t do — just isn’t valuable. I haven’t seen a single example of something that was easier to do on the Touch Bar when I have a giant screen and trackpad/mouse already. I don’t need micro-scrubber interfaces or color sliders or Emoji bars, and the volume/brightness sliders are imprecise.
Despite customizing the bar with BetterTouchTool, including “vibrate” feedback, I invariably found I had to remove more and more things from the bar over time. Any functions in the central part of the bar were invariably triggering by accident. It was just too distracting to have things randomly happening when my finger slid onto something that doesn’t feel like an active panel.
Now, therefore, I have a Touch Bar with just a few things: a battery status indicator on the left end (near the thankfully-now-real Esc key), and the brightness/volume/mute on the right (near the wonderful Touch ID). And that’s it. It is literally 70% empty space now. This is ridiculous for something as complex and expense-adding as the Touch Bar. A complete failure of a technology.