Support MacBook Touch Bar

[alexkaessner]

Would be really nice to have the ability to create Packages for Touch Bar actions. I think it would be nice to maybe have a basic package from Atom. If you want to go specialised you can write your own and add or replace the standard actions. For example, I would love to see Indent and Outdent buttons. The ⌘+] shortcut is on my german keyboard pretty hard to remember as I have to press ⌘+alt+6.

What do you guys think? What would you like to see on a Atom Touch Bar?

PS: I know this has been tracked as Issue for Electron (electron/electron#7781), but let's discuss here what you think about the integration in Atom.

[ccdwyer]

I would love this kind of integration.

[NuckChorris]

I'd love to see the tabs on the touch bar, my vim binding mode, and the git status

[dijs]

👍

[TechRemarker]

Absolutely. What's great about Atom compared to other editors is everything down the the last dot is customizable. So extensive customization of toucher when using Atom would certainly be inline with Atom's approach.

[MiracleBlue]

Would absolutely love to be able to customise the actions for atom on the touch bar. I reckon it should allow the user to add any registered command to the touch bar, for me that would be the most useful, even though having little info tidbits like git status etc would be very nice, I'd be worried about using up the space with things that arent interactive. But that's just me. As long as I can customise the hell out of it, I will be very very happy :)

[alexkaessner]

Just for reference, Coda is using these Touch Bar actions:

[HaNdTriX]

https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/8095

[shreyasminocha]

I think I'd like to see minimap integration.

[tomdye]

Git / linting / build status

[MoOx]

At least emojis, I use them a lot in my comments 😂

[Niels-NTG]

I don't think it could be much use for me if it where just buttons. I already have some very ergonomic keybindings for those. Rather I would like to use the touchbar as a replacement for the statusbar.

[alexkaessner]

Yeah…after a few weeks working with my new MacBook I would also say that only buttons is maybe a little to less. At least for the advanced developers out there.

For this reason Atom should allow extensions to change the Touch Bar in any way. So everyone is able create and customize the Touch Bar with anything what suits best for themselves. 👌

Though a standard button action set would be a nice start…

[tmcarr]

@alexkaessner I would argue instead that Atom expose an API so that extension developers can register buttons for the user to add, then the user can add them through the View -> Edit Touch Bar Buttons feature.

I dont want an extension changing a touchbar that I have extensively configured.

[alexkaessner]

@tmcarr You're totally right! Thats the better way to handle this.

[evanmhm]

I would love to be able to switch tabs like on Safari, even without the little previews it would be so useful.

[adamscybot]

There are some nice use cases.

• A minimap (albeit rotated horizontally 🙃 ) that you can swipe across.
• User configured shortcuts to commands from the command palette (beautify, git push, whatever)
• A color picker when you select a CSS colour value 😲
• Act as a status bar with stats, line count, number of linting errors for current file.

The coolest stuff is contextual. Taking the example with the css colours, the colour picker would appear automatically when you begin to type color:. When you type a function declaration, a button could appear to add the JSDoc. Autosuggest for variable names when you type let or var. List goes on.

Stuff like this could actually be useful rather than duplicating whats on screen.

[PeterTeng]

I think simply showing current branch information if very helpful. Such as branch name commits count behind or ahead.

[evanmhm]

Touchbar support will be included in the next Electron beta release, 1.6.3! More details on the new docs page.

[Weuxel]

When will that be included in Atom?

[50Wliu]

No ETA.

[evanmhm]

Who here knows how to start development on something like this? I am very interested in helping but I have little experience with atom specifically. I've also done some experiments with the Touch Bar support in electron and it's looking pretty good right now.

[50Wliu]

Specifically, we'd need to wait for a stable release of Electron that contains the touchbar support so that we can integrate it into Atom. Updating Atom's Electron version is very high-risk though, so generally that take some time.

[IchordeDionysos]

For the meantime you could use the BetterTouchTool to customize your Touchbar inside Atom the way you want it to and maybe add some useful buttons to it.

[Phooto]

I've tried BetterTouchTool with Mplab, and it really doesn't seem to work. Seems clumsy, at best. Don't waste your money!

[davecarlson]

Electron 1.6.5 is stable now (touchbar was in 1.6.4 beta :) )

LGTFM!! +1

[audvin]

This is awesome news, when is the next planned release of Atom with Touch Bar support?

[50Wliu]

No ETA. We're hard at work updating Atom to use Electron 1.6.5 though. #12696

[massontom]

yeah would be cool to have that ;)

[Multiply]

Now that #12696 is merged, can we assume this arrive in 1.19.x?

[50Wliu]

The functionality to add touch bar actions should be included in Atom 1.19.0, though I doubt that Atom will have some implemented. Does however mean that package authors can start making their own :).

[50Wliu]

Therefore I think this issue can now be closed.

[alexkaessner]

Is there already any (API) reference on how to create these actions with a package?

[50Wliu]

Here's the Electron docs: https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/touch-bar/.

[sadovnychyi]

Sorry for noise, but could be interesting to somebody: API in action: https://github.com/autocomplete-python/autocomplete-python/releases/tag/v1.9.0

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