In Mail, the Touch Bar makes sorting the inbox fast and easy, with buttons for flag, archive, and delete, as well as a button that guesses where you might want to file each message. This is just a short list of the ways the Touch Bar delighted in me in each app. Using the Touch Bar in appsĪlong with the Escape key and the Control Strip, the Touch Bar presents app-specific controls in the center, and that’s where the real magic happens. I’m not going to bother, because in my time with the Touch Bar, it’s worked perfectly. Keyboard shortcuts that use Escape still work (like Command-Option-Escape, to force-quit an app), but if you’re concerned that the Touch Bar itself could freeze up and prevent that, you could always remap Escape to a different physical key.
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The only time it goes way is when you expand the Control Strip to its full length, but when that happens, an X button shows up where you’d expect Escape to be, and tapping X shrinks the Control Strip again to reveal the Escape key. The Escape key, which is no longer a real physical key, hangs out on the left side of the Touch Bar almost all the time. The Control Strip has room for four buttons, and you can tap an arrow to expand it to the full set of controls that once lived on the row of function keys (screen brightness, Mission Control, Launchpad, keyboard backlighting, iTunes controls, volume controls). Sure, you could use keyboard shortcuts and hot corners to do these things instead, but having them on the Touch Bar is better. I customized my Control Strip to include volume, brightness, a screenshot button, and Siri.
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The default set of Control Strip keys is brightness, volume, mute, and Siri, but you can select from tons of useful shortcuts, like buttons to take a screenshot, start dictation, open Notification Center, or put your Mac to sleep. That will display a grid of buttons on your screen, and then you use the MacBook Pro’s giant trackpad to drag them from the screen directly onto the Touch Bar.
You can choose which four buttons you want in System Preferences > Keyboard by clicking Control Strip. The Control Strip is a set of four of your favorite keys, and it stays on the right side of the Touch Bar all the time. But if you never use those keys, you could also have the Fn key expand the Control Strip to full size. The default shows the function keys: F1, F2, and so on. Visit System Preferences > Keyboard, and you can choose what happens when you press the Fn key. The Touch Bar is incredibly handy not only because its controls change to match the app you’re using, but also because it’s so customizable. The Touch Bar is designed to blend in and look like keys, not a bright, glowing display. Nonetheless, the Touch Bar stays visible and legible even if you are sitting at an off-angle to your Mac. It’s also optimized for viewing at a 45-degree angle, looking down from above, which is odd for any screen. You can’t adjust its brightness yourself, for example, because if it was too bright it would start looking more like a display than a set of keys. With that said, beyond the basic customization features, there are plenty of things that can be done with a MacBook Pro's Touch Bar that so many users might not even realize.The Touch Bar is an OLED strip that’s tempting to call a display, but Apple wants developers and users to think of it as an input device, not a display. RELATED: MacBook Trackpad Gestures: What They Can Do & Best Ones To Use And because it can be customized so intricately, one person's Touch Bar looks could be completely different from another, depending on how they use their computers and what features they find most important. It's designed to replace those archaic function keys that are rarely used with something far more high-tech and customizable.Īside from just looking cool, the touch sensitivity allows for simple and easy one-touch access to favorite programs. While some think the long touchscreen strip that appears above the keyboard is just a gimmick, with rumors even floating around that Apple might get rid of it, the feature actually serves a useful purpose. When Apple introduced the Touch Bar on its MacBook Pro keyboards back in 2016, it became a game-changer.
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