Also not parent.

I do blind type but I love the Touch Bar. There are many CAD programs that I use approximately monthly and I can never remember which F keys does what exactly. In my office I have cheat sheets on the wall but when out of office having icons makes using those applications much better.

I have my touchbar display the time, battery percentage and current song, so when I look down it's mostly to look at these. I also have a script that displays the last line of a particular file, so if I pipe a script's output in there I can look at its progress. I can swipe anywhere with two fingers to change the volume, three fingers is ctrl+tab (that one isn't useful, I need to figure out a better use), four fingers is brightness. I like it better than the F keys.

I did have to remap Caps Lock to ESC, because ESC on the touchbar was nigh unusable.

How do you get all that functionality? Especially the multi finger swiping and the last line of the file

BetterTouchTool. It's not free, but it's cheap enough, and it lets you do a lot of cool things (including the multi finger swiping which you can assign to anything you want). You can write AppleScript routines and assign them to buttons, or have them run every n milliseconds to display something, which is what I did for the last line of the file thing.

Not parent, but I'm also a user that likes the Touch Bar (see comment history).

To answer,

> Do you usually blind type?

Yes.

> If so, what advantage does it bring to you to look down on your keys?

For simple actions (like opening a new tab) there is no need to look down on keys. IMO this is little Apple's fault, whenever I use a tabbable & Touch Bar-usable application I set the new tab button on the right. I usually place the trash button (on Finder, Mail and some other apps) on the middle of the Touch Bar.

For some more complex actions (like selecting an emoji/suggestion, or moving between photos, etc...) it's just as fast/faster to glance over and move your fingers instead of using shortcuts/trackpad.

> Also, in an optimal seating position (elbows at 90 degrees)

I'm not sure if I'm in optimal seating position, but... (If you're meaning if my elbows are on the same height of the display yes)

> do your fingers obscure the visibility of the touch bar?

No, not at all. I can clearly see the Touch Bar whether my fingers are.

Is there an app on Mac that does not support clover-T for new tabs?

No, but I frequently find it easier to reach the Touch Bar (where only one finger needs to move) than to press Cmd-T (where two fingers need to move). I also use Cmd-T a lot too! :-)

Pages?

What are you guys doing that you touch type using FN keys? Touchbar is far better — you can’t scrub audio or video. You can adjust things with more granularity with sliders. It’s contextual.

I don’t remember ever using a hardware F6 or F4 key in my life, but the touchbar I use all the time.

Lots of software uses Fn key bindings by default. IntelliJ & mc come to mind first, but there are many others. Sometimes they can be remapped, but given the number of key bindings required by pro software, replacing roughly 1/5 of the keys with a silly little nontactile screen is a nonstarter for me. I never look at the keyboard (that's what the real screen is for). Indeed this was the precipitating factor driving me away from the Apple 'ecosystem' in 2018.

I do know where the keys are, but don't know what the Function keys do in 90%+ of the software I use.

Even where I use keyboard shortcuts frequently, such as VSCode, the Function keys are not really involved because they are rather far away.

incorporating a display is a perfect middle ground for the thousands of shortcuts you will never use enough to remember.

What do you actually use the F keys for? I haven't used them in so long that I only remember what F2 and F5 did.

Debugging: step, step into, step out, run/continue

You can easily reconfigure keyboard shortcuts in most IDEs. The function key row was never ergonomically placed to begin with. My current keyboard doesn't have one either (ErgoDox).

These actions are also not that important to be able to hit very quickly. Back when I did use function keys, I usually had to look anyway, because they're so far away from home row, and the time between using them is usually quite long. And even though I knew the function keys purpose in an IDE, I would never know them in any other apps, leaving that row useless when not programming. (Well, I use them for volume and brightness control, but again.. it's not a muscle memory action anyway)

I do think fundamentally speaking the Touchbar is the right idea. It's not better for everyone, obviously. But it's probably a bit better for most people. I'm just not convinced it's a big enough improvement to make the added cost worth it. It probably still ends up being mostly unused, which is worse when it's an expensive touch display instead of extra keys.

Personally I'd drop the whole row, maybe but the speakers up there instead, and make the keyboard wider.. put in keys between the two halfs of the keyboard like TypeMatrix or ErgoDox.. but that's never gonna happen