In my experience, adding those functions to the Touch Bar via Better Touch Tool was just as easy as making f-key bindings, plus I get easy and visibly-distinguishable per-app bindings.
The Touch Bar is great, Apple just isn't going far enough.
The default touch bar was pretty useless to me, mostly because the buttons keep moving around on every app and I never remember what it can do. But a few tweaks and it's useful again:
In System Preferences > Touchbar I manually added all the applications I normally use into the "always show Fn keys" mode, so now the touchbar basically always shows Esc and the Fn keys.
Then, add Apptivate to tie each Fn key to my most used apps (F1 = Finder, F2 = Slack, F3 = Chrome, F4 = Sublime, etc), and I can easily switch among my most used applications. It's not quite touch-typeable like with hardware fn keys, but close enough.
I briefly looked around for a utility but didn't find one, but basically my goal is this: a static touch bar that never changes, which switches to or launches a set of specified apps. Is that possible?
Hah! Thats pretty wild, but I wish I could have some apps that use the touch bar like that. It seems so worthless now because I only really use it as a bunch of buttons. But if I used just one app that had that rich multi-touch input, it would be so fun I think.
I imagine its one where the vision of the product and what developers actually came up with never really aligned prroperly.
edit: Oh, this app isn't about the Touch Bar! It's about toggling the functionality of the regular function keys between F1, F2, etc... and their media/shortcut labels.
This kind of use case should have been what the Touch Bar supported.
I was actually excited when the Touch Bar came out because I though I would finally be able to just have named buttons, even click-through menus, instead of having to memorize what f1-f12 did on a given app.
Imagine if instead of “ok, f1 opens my [some application], I just need to memorize that” you could just add a button that says [some application]”.
Sadly the support for the Touch Bar was pretty middling to poor.
Touchbar can be useful especially with apps like Pock to save some screen real estate. The only thing that they should do is to bring back ESC key and maybe allow for switching numbers row to F-keys with Fn. That would allow for rich media control and whatever you want on touchbar and still have proper, tactile functionality of keys.
Too bad there isn't a way to have your app control the touch bar even when it isn't in focus. I would have liked to write a background application that overrides it for personal use. I already have one that does that for the caps lock key.
I do have touchbar envy! I tend not to look at my keyboard too much on desktop, but when on a laptop it's definitely in my peripheral vision and would hopefully encourage me to learn it's shortcuts. There's a lot of UX work involved to make it all work perfectly though. App's especially, shouldn't just use the touchbar, they should make it easier with visual in app reminders about what's down there. They should do this with the standard FN-keys too for us non-touchbar folk. I'm a big fan of having keyboard shortcuts shown on screen UI's.
There's no denying it can do more in than Fn-keys.
That would be sad, I really like the touchbar, and I've seen people use it as makeshift sliders for audio and a mini-midi keyboard, and the context-sensitive recommendations are so much more useful to me than F-keys, I'm just way too lazy do memorize multiple layers for different apps. I really do hope they don't go back to plain F-keys only.
I find the Touch Bar extremely useful when the app supports it. JetBrains IDE’s have excellent touchbar support. Very easy to configure. All my most used shortcuts and macros are mapped, big productivity gains I feel.
Problem with the Fn keys is discoverability: i never remember which functionality is available on which key, and you have to remember different mappings for different apps. Actually thought Apple's solution for this, the touchbar, was pretty nice, sad that it failed...
I think the Touch Bar has potential, to be honest. The main selling point is that it offers apps a way to make previously hidden functionality much more discoverable. The traditional row of function keys is flexible and simple, but it also places a lot of demands on the user -- it's up to you to research what each key does in all possible contexts and to commit that to memory. The odds are very high that there exists at least one context in which some function key performs a function that would be useful to you but you weren't aware of it. The Touch Bar could be a remedy to this situation.
That said, I haven't used it and don't want to sing its praises too early. But I also don't want to wish it dead on arrival.
The touch bar is going to be really useful for a file manager I'm developing [1]. Traditionally, such file managers use function keys for common tasks (eg. copy with F5). On Mac, you have to press Fn to get the function keys, which is very inconvenient. Now my users can use the traditional key bindings _and_ remember them more easily!
I'm one of those (there are dozens of us!) who actually liked the Touch Bar and not only that, deeply regret Apple giving up on it. I found it eminently useful to have contextual controls I could use rather than those non-descript Fn keys I don't really ever use.
It wasn't perfect, for example the fact that it was just a single bar meant it was hard (but not impossible) to use accurately without looking, but to me it really was a step in the right direction.
I hope they bring it back at some point, maybe in a way that appeases the Fn crowd as well so we can all be happy. Maybe a few physical buttons with an embedded screen a la stream decks, and a smaller bar in the center for more fluid things? I don't know. All I know is I miss it dearly.
Love Spotify with touchbar, debugging with vs code etc - shame it was hated.
A mini Touch Bar with fn keys above would be lovely!
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