Notice the missing top row of function keys. People have speculated that this top row may be replaced by an OLED touch screen.
Comparing the above photo to the Macbook keyboard, it would seem that the top row includes the escape key: http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2014/11/retinamacbookkeyboard-800x484.jpg
If this is the case, any software developer that uses the escape key a lot may not be very happy.
I have Caps Lock mapped to Ctrl and I'm glad that MacOS provides this option out of the box, but Caps Lock as Esc is not an option for me. I hope there will be an out of the box way to map Escape to something sensible. I'd trade ~ for Esc anytime, as long as ~ and ` are accessible via the OLED strip.
I met Bram at Vimfest in Berlin recently and asked him if he remaps Esc. He said something along the lines of: "No, I aim for the upper left of my keyboard and hope for the best".
I met Bram at Vimfest in Berlin recently and asked him if he remaps Esc. He said something along the lines of: "No, I aim for the uppI used 'jj' for a while but the short delay to display j threw me off. I have Ctrl on Caps Lock so pressing Ctrl-[ is decent but still: I never got used to it.
Can't imagine why. It sounds incredibly dumb.
Probably have to live with it since no one else seems to be able to make a really high quality laptop. sigh.
Having the most common functions available is something that sounds great in theory. The idea is not even new [2]. We will see if it works in practice.
Personally I think I would like the OLED strip to show my Dock permanently, so that I could switch apps without reaching to the touch pad.
[1] http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/macbook-pro/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard
The OLED strip will probably used
My solution to this has grown more and more to be "do everything on a remote box via SSH" and then it doesn't matter what laptop I use.
I am a heavy Vim user, so this is easy!
As time progressed, task switching and copy/paste were obvious shortcomings due to limitations with iOS, but the experience was mostly bearable but not awful.
Towards the end it became unbearable as the escape key was so engrossed with all things unix/linux that i gave up a month early.
If the escape key is actually vanishing, I am completely confused. macOS is a unix derivative and apple has a boatload of developers. Why would they want to alienate us?
I would imagine that most of apple's customers are not developers.
It was constantly registering touches on the top row when I didn't want them. With a laptop, I commonly rest my hand on the keyboard and touch -- but don't depress -- keys.
Today it's only used in a desktop configuration with an external keyboard.
I'm not the only one who felt this way -- see, for example, this Ars review of the gen 3, which said of the gen 2 keyboard:
"...the keyboard shed its top row of function keys, replacing them with a software-controlled touchable strip, and used a peculiar arrangement for buttons including home, insert, backspace, and delete. The result wasn't better; it was awkward."
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/thinkpad-x1-carbon-re...
Maybe a touch strip will be great or maybe it'll be rubbish, but don't pre-judge the feature based on Lenovo's increasingly shoddy engineering.
Other than the coffee-shop crowd, how many of you would say you're exclusively a laptop-keyboard user? Not a dig, just wondering.
If Apple offered an iPad Pro, running OSX with USB ports (or a thunderbolt port usb hub) for a physical keyboard, I would switch over in a heartbeat.
I did build myself an oversized desk recently, so probably I should get the M back out and have it on the desk for occasional use.
Maybe with haptic feedback that'll change, but for now any attempt to move mechanical keys to touch-screens are, for me, a net negative just because of the basic facts of reality.
They still could; the part in that picture might not be final. (It probably is though.)
I press escape OFTEN, but tildes rarely. For the most part its to get into consoles in games or other dev functions - I could see myself losing it and not being too sad.
That's used in markdown and ES6 pretty commonly.
Losing that key is a problem for me.
Also, a VIM user that actually uses the escape key? I don't know how you tolerate that. I bound jk to escape years ago, and in the rare case where I'm ssh'd into a machine that doesn't have my vim config I still find ^[ easier to type than escape (which is probably because I bound caps lock to control so ^[ is easy to type).
How would you get out of insert mode by writing jk? Or, how would you write jk in insert mode without exiting?
The change on that keyboard is that the left and right keys are now full height; they used to be half-height with a half-space above.
