Programmers Aren't Happy With a Macbook Change

Apple's new MacBook Pros are due to be revealed on Thursday. If images leaked by MacRumors are to be believed, the refresh will continue a long-running Apple tradition of removing beloved legacy features: the MacBook Air shed the optical drive, the iPhone 5 introduced the Lightning Port (making years of legacy chargers and docks useless), and most recently the iPhone 7 removed the headphone jack. Now, the new MacBook Pros appear to be removing the physical Escape key in favor of a touch-sensitive OLED strip and Touch ID. While the change isn't likely to be a problem for most regular users, it will be a major pain for one group of power users: programmers.

As Popular Mechanics explains, the Escape key is integral to quick operation of a popular text editor called Vim. As this video shows, the Escape key is used to toggle between editing and navigation modes. While the key could probably be remapped, many programmers have built up years of muscle memory, and the initial reaction to the news on Twitter was total dismay. History has proven that people will probably get over it, though; and if they don't, external keyboards featuring escape keys will still work with the new Macbook Pros. (More MacBook Pro stories.)