Can I use Shift, Alt and Control Modifier Keys Together With the Function Keys on the Touch Bar?

Question

I've configured my touch bar to always show function keys in one program where I use those frequently (IntelliJ IDEA, code editor). Many hotkeys in IDEA are triggered using a function key together with shift, alt or control, e.g. for renaming a variable, I use Shift+F6.

With the emulated function keys, this does not work, the program acts as if I had just hit F6 without holding down the alt key.

It was no problem with the hardware function keys on my old MacBook.

Is this a known bug, or a limitation one has to live with? Or is there some way to work around it? Perhaps I'm just to stupid and missing something obvious?

This is a major pain for me as a software developer…

Answer 1

As @Patrick mentions in his answer, one cause of this problem is Karabiner-Elements not enabling the Touch Bar "keyboard" by default. The solution is to enable that keyboard in Karabiner-Elements Preferences (Vendor ID 1452, Product ID 34304) as shown in following screenshot:

I filed Touch Bar keyboard should be enabled by default · Issue #1700 · tekezo/Karabiner-Elements to request it be enabled by default in Karabiner-Elements.

More information in the following comments:

• https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements/issues/535#issuecomment-350522019
• https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements/issues/535#issuecomment-350597725

Answer 2

Ah, after some digging, I found out it's the fault of Karabiner Elements, a utility program I'm using to reassign some keys.

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements/issues/435

Answer 3

To make function keys work as normal i Android Studio - apart from enabling keyboard: "No product name" I had to go into Preferences -> Function keys and DISABLE the option: "Use all F1, F2.... as standard function keys"....