[dasil003]

I’m only two months in having been clinging to my 2015 MBP until recently forced to upgrade by my company. Now I feel borderline incompetent at times when I can’t hit the arrow keys or escape smoothly. One solution is to use an external keyboard, but then I won’t adapt to the new feel and I’ll be stuck like this forever, unable to type competently in a meeting or any other time I’m away from my desk.

I could probably get used to the feel of the latest butterfly keys, but the arrow keys and virtual escape key and to a lesser extent virtual F-keys are intolerable. It’s like has Jony Ive ever had to type something? Hell no, he has people to do that for him, the important thing is everything he touches look immaculate in a 90-degree closeup and framed above his mantel.

[bmurphy1976]

You should make the caps lock key your escape key, that's what I do. It's vastly superior to the touchbar escape key. In fact, I even prefer it to a regular escape key at this point, although my muscle memory does cause problems when I use somebody else's computer.

I removed the escape key from my touchbar entirely because I kept accidentally brushing it when I went to type ` or ~. I also had the lock screen widget on the touchbar for a couple months, but I removed that because again I kept accidentally brushing that and locking my laptop when I meant to hit delete.

I think you are right, Ivy probably never really used the keyboard. He probably has a desk both at home and at work with the magic keyboard and that keyboard is decent enough. The couple hours he spends on the plane travelling between Cupertino and London isn't enough time for him to build up empathy for what the rest of us have to go through.

[dasil003]

Already use it for Ctrl in the UNIX tradition, and it's really hard to change that muscle memory.

[jacobolus]

If you get a Japanese layout keyboard, you get a bunch of extra free keys which you use for whatever you want. https://i.imgur.com/tuCklIJ.jpg

Particularly handy are the extra thumb keys (I use the one to the right of the spacebar for backwards delete, but vim users could put escape there.). Also control is in the right place and caps lock is in the hard-to-reach corner, where it should be.

One especially nice approach is to re-map all of the right-hand letter keys one position over to the right, spreading the hands apart, making right enter and shift more accessible, and leaving an extra column of easily accessible index-finger keys in the middle of the keyboard.

[dasil003]

Oof, the vertical return key on the UK keyboard almost made me tear my hair out when I did a 3-year stint in London :)

[jacobolus]

If you shift the right hand over to the right by one key, then return will be in the same position relative to your hand as on a US-ANSI keyboard. You then only need to find an appropriate key to use for the right bracket and backslash, but there are plenty of good choices.

[Xcelerate]

I have caps lock mapped to Ctrl and Ctrl mapped to Esc. Seems to work pretty well.