Is there a way to decouple touchbar from active window btw? For example if I have Skype running I'd like to have Skype's buttons on touchbar regardless of focused window. I tried using BetterTouchTool but all I found out was quite hacky ways to mimic keypresses and whatnot instead of pinning app specific UIs.

Useless to me too, that's just an example out a million things you could do.

> Is there a way to decouple touchbar from active window btw

You can, touchbar items are global, app-scoped or part of a group that you can open/close programatically (clicking on a touchbar button, usually). The annoying bit is syncing: you'll need to poll for the state of Skype.

I just have no use for a touchbar. After all, I have a screen! I never look at my keyboard.... it’s all about tactile feedback, which the touchbar notoriously lacks.

I find this very narrow-minded. You can't imagine a single thing that a programmable tactile interface would bring over keys (that you probably can't reliably touch-type either, fn keys are far)?

I never looked at my keyboard either. I still don't, I look at my touchbar from time to time to do things that would take me longer to do if I had to move a cursor (checking the time, my next calendar event, controlling music amongst a dozen things)

Moving the mouse doesn't really bother me, and there are a million ways to wire functionality to keyboard expressions or in-UI functionality. I do miss my hardware volume, prev track, next track, play/pause functionality exactly because I could use them easily without shifting focus at all, even to my keyboard.

OTOH I'm not holding my breath for Apple to meet my needs, they aren't that kind of company.

Personally, I've never spent any time trying to customize the touch bar because I am never using my laptop without an external keyboard, because of how fuckin' terrible the built in one is. So happy they added some travel back to the keys. I have put off buying a new laptop for years because of how much I hate that stupid keyboard.

Also there are actions you can program on the touchbar that don't require looking at it. For instance I set it up so that sliding two fingers anywhere on the touchbar changes the volume.

Are you old enough to remember when PC applications came with templates that fit over a 101 key keyboard to show you what all the fn keys did? That's why very little outside professional tooling uses them for anything but system-wide shortcuts anymore. They're horrible for discoverability so unless you live in the app enough to thoroughly memorize them they aren't terribly useful.

As much as I don't care for the Hot Bar in general, it is far better for per-app shortcuts that are used rarely enough not to require (and thus develop) muscle memory. You'd need one of those OLED keyboards to do much better.

On the keyboard, you don't know what a key would do in a given situation.

Sounds like we need a third option.

I actually only just now thought of mapping 3-finger swipe to undo/redo. I've only been messing around with it for five minutes but it's kind of nice, honestly! It's better than cmd+z when you need to undo/redo more than once, because it bypasses the key repeat setting.

you do have feedback with the touchbar! As I recently learned, the trackpad click isn't really a click. It can be triggered by software! And bettertouchtool has a specific action for "touchpad haptic feedback". That means you can trigger a touchpad click when you tap a touchbar button, and it perfectly fine as feedback.

Yes you do have to look. I'm not recommending touchbar actions for things that you do so often that it's a problem (though I have a big button to switch between firefox and vscode, big enough that I don't have to look). But it's not like I was using fn keys without looking either