I think the touchbar is superb for general non-techie users who are not keyboard shortcut wiz, and there are A LOT of them.
The thing I found sad is the lack of push from Apple, to make it more useful and versatile. It's nearly the same since its inception. People have to rely on 3rd party app, say, BetterTouchTool(which is excellent) to make Touchbar more useful.
Hmm, I'm not a native English speaker so I might have not exactly conveyed my intentions. I'm definitely not trying to argue that other people are unfair, but more just that people should try it out a bit more.
> I'd love to ignore the Touch Bar, but since they stole the F key row for it, I cannot.
I'm genuinely curious about this F-keys every time I write about the Touch Bar - I've never encountered use for those keys that are really useful.
> Since there's no physical feedback
Yeah, that part I agree. If you're still suffering about it (regardless whether you use Touch Bar regularly or not), you might want the HapticKey app that I've mentioned it previously.
> The content is on the screen, if you can touch type you shouldn't ever be looking down
Well, because the Touch Bar's layout is pretty stable, I find that I can touch-type the Touch Bar without looking down the screen. It becomes muscle memory, just like a usual keyboard.
There are some very common operations across apps (Linux/Windows) that I use all the time and can be stabbed without thinking:
F2 - rename
F5 - refresh
F11 - fullscreen
If you are programmer then it's kind of essential during debugging:
F5 - run / continue
F9 - insert breakpoint
F10 - step over
F11 - step in
Not having physical keys for navigating would be a nightmare.
I've never used any of them you've listed (except for F5-refresh, which I avoid and use Cmd-R). The fn-keys are as context-dependent as the Touch Bar and it's even more opaque than what it does just by glancing the buttons.
For debug tools, Xcode unfortunately doesn't provide Touch Bar buttons for them (which I think is a pity), but IntelliJ IDEA seems to be providing them.
With this example I'm firmly thinking that having fn-keys just for the sake of people who do know a bit of key shortcuts would be a nightmare.
I would be much more supportive of ideas like "keys with displays" or a non-interactive strip to act as labels. What I dream of is physical pixels for tactile displays or a fleet of magnetic microbots that can swarm together to form switches, knobs and sliders at will.
That's a very roundabout way of saying "people tried it, hate it, and told others: UNFAIR." In essence that argument can be used to dismiss anyone who dislikes the Touch Bar because they MIGHT have read something negative about it at some point, and therefore have been corrupted from forming their own first-hand opinion (???).
I'd love to ignore the Touch Bar, but since they stole the F key row for it, I cannot. I am forced to use it to interact with software that once worked fine. Since there's no physical feedback, and the virtual keys aren't correctly aligned with the physical ones: it is a frustration. At least we regained the escape key.
As to why I don't actively use it: I look at the screen, not the top of my hands. The content is on the screen, if you can touch type you shouldn't ever be looking down, so the Touch Bar is an anti-feature put in completely the wrong location (i.e. above the keyboard, instead under the screen) for people who struggle to type.