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Ask HN: After 2-3 years, what are your favorite Touch Bar use cases on the Mac?

8 points by benguild ↗ HN

13 comments

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Akarnani
I love the Apple Pay / fingerprint reader button.

Beyond that, I do my level best to avoid touching it. The volume and brightness features are nice but it would be better to not have had it as I mis-key it all the time and it exits me from where I'm working.

hboon
Out of curiosity. How many of us knows that swiping sideways quickly on the volume button changes the volume?

Ditto for brightness.

landa
It doesn't have to be quickly. It's very convenient. Just touch the volume or brightness button and keep holding, then just move your finger left or right to change the value.
hboon
No. I really mean swipe quickly. Try it out :)
java-man
none. please bring back the regular keys!
framebit
I guess it's kind of nice to have Spotify controls for pause and play over other applications, but I would gladly give that up for regular keys. That's literally the only thing I can think of. I want my function keys, I want my physical volume and brightness.
ecesena
Mostly volume & brightness. In some rare cases I use it for emoji, but it's typically faster to get them from iMessage and copy & paste. I tried with screenshots and lock screen, but I'm too used to the keyboard shortcut and I always use these.

I guess I'm not really using the touch bar a lot because I'm used to looking at the monitor vs the keyboard, which I think it's pretty common for many folks here. Maybe people used to looking at the keyboard have more uses?

actionowl
I love using touch id instead of password for sudo.

I also accidentally hit the Siri button all the damn time, I should probably remove it or something.

WillKirkby
Touch ID login is super convenient, and remapping Caps Lock as a tactile Esc key has made for a much more pleasant vim experience. That's it.
docker_up
I have not bought a MacBook since they introduced the Touch Bar. It offends me that they got rid of it, and I refuse to pay money for their laptops until they offer me one without it. I'm about to switch entirely to Lenovo and never looking back if they don't make one without a Touch Bar by 2019.