macOS Big Sur Preview

Re:macOS Big Sur Preview by throwaway894345 on Monday June 22, 2020 @04:58PM (#23606550)

I will say I really like the lock button and the touch ID integration. I hate the lack of physical escape key (especially for vim); however, they are fixing that on many (most? all?) new models. Mostly I'm pretty meh about the touch bar. Not sure how much cost it's adding, but I'd probably rather they reduce the cost.

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Re:macOS Big Sur Preview by jey on Monday June 22, 2020 @05:38PM (#23607075)

Have you considered remapping Caps Lock to Escape? There's an option for that in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences.

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Re:macOS Big Sur Preview by pfranz on Monday June 22, 2020 @09:21PM (#23608997)

I've remapped Caps Lock to Control, which turned out to be very useful in various Remote Desktop and VirtualBox scenarios since it requires a left-Control key, which Mac laptop keyboards are missing.

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Re:macOS Big Sur Preview by dijit on Monday June 22, 2020 @05:57PM (#23607332)

FWIW, escape is actually slower (both in movement speed and in actual invokation) than ^[.

lit: `CTRL+[`

I know habits die hard, and "you're holding it wrong" is not a valid excuse- and I know that I also dislike massively not having an escape key.

But for vim specifically; there is an escape sequence and the escape key is an alternative method for that. (similar to how the arrows "work" but hjkl is the "real" way of moving).

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Re:macOS Big Sur Preview by emilecantin on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @10:18AM (#23614195)

This really depends on your keyboard layout. On mine (Canadian Multilingual, yes, I like my accents), [ is actually Alt+9. So Ctrl+[ becomes Ctrl-Alt-9 which is an unwieldy combination, to say the least. I like my Esc key where it is.

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Re:macOS Big Sur Preview by pfranz on Monday June 22, 2020 @09:19PM (#23608981)

My beef is that ESC in macOS is the universal non-destructive dismiss button. I'm glad they went back to making it a physical key.

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Re:macOS Big Sur Preview by 72deluxe on Monday June 22, 2020 @08:05PM (#23608456)

So you’re saying that pressing two keys is faster than pressing one key? In which universe??

Is eating 2 sandwiches also faster than eating one?

Are 2 electrical impulses also faster than 1?

I think not.

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Re:macOS Big Sur Preview by dijit on Monday June 22, 2020 @08:27PM (#23608630)

yes pressing two keys can be faster than pressing one, because you have two hands, pressing A+L is faster than pressing control+delete, due to locality.. your hands are likely closer to A+L than control and delete.

Locality is important, in fact it's the largest factor in determining speed of a hotkey's access.. "distance from home-row"[0] is a measurement that is consistently touted when referring to vim in particular.

Control+[ is significantly faster because your hands move independently. However I'm just now remembering that I always remapped my capslock to be an additional control, so it isn't necessarily universal that control is "as fast" since my "control" is actually on the homerow.. which is unusual.

As it happens, though I was wrong earlier and was confusing ^c and ^[

from `:h i_CTRL-C`

> CTRL-C: Quit insert mode, go back to Normal mode. Do not check for abbreviations. Does not trigger the InsertLeave autocommand event.

^[ is interpreted exactly the same as ESC; vim can't see a difference. (you can see this under `:h keycode` )

[0]: https://books.google.se/books?id=LA9QDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT201&lpg=P...

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