I initially found the touch bar to be a bit gimmicky on the 2016 MacBook Pro. It was a little buggy and worked inconsistently. But fast forward several years l

I initially found the touch bar to be a bit gimmicky on the 2016 MacBook Pro. It was a little buggy and worked inconsistently. But fast forward several years later to the 2018 model, and I've come to really appreciate it. Even as a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts, I rarely, if ever, use function keys. The only regular usage that comes to mind is editing markup in the Chrome dev tools (F2 shortcut). And I rarely used the Escape key. After remapping caps lock to control, and then using control+[ for escape, you're free to use Vim, Emacs, etc. without getting carpal tunnel. I cannot fathom people actually hitting escape on a regular basis when using Vim; that seems like ergonomic egregiousness :-). In some ways, I find the touch bar to be _more_ efficient than dedicated function keys. Changing the brightness and volume, for example, require only a single motion--tap and move the slider to the desired setting (no need to tap first, and then slide). So instead of repeatedly tapping a dedicated key, you can immediately dial-in the desired setting. Also, I've found when watching videos or music, having a large slider on the touch bar to adjust the video position is pretty nice. Very easy to jump around. And context-sensitive shortcuts are generally well-designed. Some things I've found useful on the touch bar include screenshots--a visual representation of the various options are shown on the screen (current window/full-screen/or region), along with options for where to save the screenshot. Other useful features include tab-preview and switching in Safari, word suggestions as you're typing, and type to Siri (e.g. once enabled, you can tap the Siri icon and say "remind me to do X in Y hours"). Not to mention other useful tidbits like emojis when using iMessage. I can see how people might dismiss the touch bar without having explored its capabilities--but there's no denying the innovation behind context-sensitive dynamic keys. Overall, I'm a big fan. On Linux (specifically gnome), the situation is a bit different as function keys tend to be more prevalent.