Touch bar

A touch strip or touch bar is a touch-sensitive row of soft keys, media keys and/or other controls above, below or in-place-of a row of physical function keys.

The role of the keys and controls are often indicated through lights, with different colours and/or under different symbols or a full-fledged touch screen.

Examples

HP QuickPlay

One of the earliest touch strips were touch controls above the function key row on mid/late-00's HP laptops, backlit by blue LEDs.

They included e.g. media keys, a volume bar and sometimes bass/treble bars, sometimes branded with HP's QuickPlay brand and tied to software with that name.

ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2nd-gen

The 2014 ThinkPad X1 Carbon keyboard used an "adaptive" touch-strip with a black-and-white LCD screen instead of the function key row. The Fn key was on the touch-strip and could be used to cycle between different sets of keys.

Rapoo KX

The Rapoo KX has a fixed set of symbols for function keys and media keys that are always lit by a set of bi-colour LEDs. The LEDs change colour when the Fn key is pressed, indicating the different set of functions. The keys vibrate when touched.

Apple 2016 MacBook Pro

Some MacBook Pro models, released in fall of 2016 contains a Touch Bar instead of a function key row. It has a touch-sensitive OLED colour screen under application control. The Esc key is moved into this bar and it also has the power button with integrated fingerprint reader.

See also

• Optimus Maximus and Optimus Popularis are keyboards with physical keys where every key has a colour screen. Optimus Popularis also has a display bar in-between the function key row and numeric row.