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 touch-bar gives feedback through vibration.

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.