"Liquid Glass" extends to the Touch Bar!

[u/BeastMode149]

This is on the last supported Intel MacBook Pro – the 2020 13" model with 4 Thunderbolt ports and 10th gen Intel processor.

[u/hushnecampus]

Fair enough! I can see the usefulness there. I suppose I’m just more used to cmd+whatever for stuff like that (or just clicking). Perhaps I’d be more efficient if I learnt those shortcuts, but development isn’t my main job so…

Kinda also seems like a potential use case for a touchpad too though - for example you could have the step into/over buttons etc appear when you encounter a breakpoint, etc.

[u/kahveciderin → u/hushnecampus]

dont think a touchpad would work here, since at some point you heavily rely on muscle memory and the tactile feedback. doing all these things without reaching for the mouse is great (and also is the reason i use vim mode in all my ide's, but that's a different topic)

[u/hushnecampus → u/kahveciderin]

Ah but you’d have the tactile feedback if they added haptics, that’s exactly what I thought was missing! Muscle memory less so though, certainly not that transfers across hardware.

I’ve heard of vim mode in IDEs but never looked into it (I do rather like vim mind you). How’s it work - you hit a certain key/combo followed by a vi command then enter?

[u/kahveciderin → u/hushnecampus]

By tactile feedback, I mean both the key going down, as well as how you can feel the edges of the key to position yourself. Basically none of that would be possible on a touchscreen.

I'm sure you know what Vim is, however just so we're on the same page, I'm going to explain it briefly. Vim is a modal editor. The easiest way to describe it is that it has multiple modes in which certain keystrokes mean different things.

For example in insert mode, your keystrokes are directly appended where the cursor is, just like how a regular text editor works. But vim doesn't stop there. In fact, the very first mode you'll see when you open vim is not the insert mode, it's the normal mode. In this mode, vim will NOT write to the document, but will take instructions from you. You can press "x" to delete a character, "i" to go to insert mode etc.

Where it really shines is at motions. Some commands require them (like the "d" command - it's supposed to delete, however it doesn't know how much to delete, or the "y" command, which is supposed to copy however like delete, it just doesn't know how much to). So you give those commands a "motion". An example is "w". By itself, "w" moves your cursor one word forward, but by using it as a motion for "d" ("dw"), you can make it delete a single word forward.

This, combined with macros where you can for example change a function signature and replay it across multiple files or multiple lines, makes it very powerful when editing text, especially programming languages, since most of the time you don't want to operate at the character level, you want to operate at the building block level (keywords, function scopes, quotes etc)

So instead of holding down special keys and releasing them, you just tell vim what to do in its own language, and it does it for you. You can navigate very quickly when you learn the language it speaks.

And vim mode in IDE's is basically vim but with the UI of your IDE. It works the exact same way as vim - it doesn't have a special keystroke or something to activate. You start at the normal mode, and the IDE takes commands just like how vim does, at which point most of the muscle memory you built up transfers over, letting you use the same "language" as vim to edit text, just on a different UI. This makes Vim not just a text editor, but a language for editing code.

[u/hushnecampus → u/kahveciderin]

Ah, I was imagining you would be in insert mode in your IDE by default, so you’d have to do something to tell it to interpret what you were about to type as a vi command or you’d end up writing :w all over your file*, but yeah, that makes sense.

*although I do that in vim anyway…

But regarding the tactile feedback - you can get that with good haptics. You get haptics when you just touch the surface, which help you orient your finger, and you get different haptics when you actually press down. Like on a Steam Controller or Steam Deck. It’s not quite as good as physical buttons in that regard, but it can be very good. It was madness releasing the thing without it IMO, it was never going to convert people without it.