Touching the Touchbar, what changed in the last year?
nyancat invasion
It takes Courage — Apple.
The Controversy
Apple first introduced the touchbar mac in late 2016 and since then it has been a controversial topic among various communities including the developer community. Questions like Can touchbar improve dev workflow have been floating around unanswered.
Initially apple was the only company deveoping anything for the touchbar and let’s just say they were not doing a very good job, but it has been an year and many developers have come up with some pretty intresting ideas.
Spoiler Alert: All hail the nyancat
Iterm2+Touchbar
Iterm has been the goto terminal app for developers and with the latest update iterm now supports the touchbar
Iterm provides handy features like type suggestions and color picker right in the default set but this is highly customizable.
You can add things like status messages and even custom shortcuts to things like i have a new window shortcut
You can read the full documentation here
You can download iterm here
ZSH-Iterm-Touchbar
If you are a zsh user christmas came early for you because you can add zsh-iterm-touchbar plugin to your shell and it replaces your default function keys with things like your git branch and current status of your repository. Lit, isn’t it🔥
*If you do not already use it I would recommend oh-my-zsh for it’s simplicity and ease of use.
Conclusion?
Touchbar is a cool idea and we have seen people do some pretty neat tricks with it but we are yet to see a use-case specifically for the touchbar. You can get typing suggestions on the screen itself and with zsh plugins and themes you can git information right in the terminal prompt.
Regardless of all that i personally feel that touchbar is a cool idea and having extra pixels is always nice. Scrubbing through photos and videos is a pleasure and as we see developers come up with innovative ideas you just never know what’s next.
PS click 💻 if you are looking for some cool party tricks😉
Originally published at gist.github.com.
