Would love a way to disable the Do Not Disturb button on my macbook without flip...

dhosek · 2026-01-07T19:54:38 1767815678

There is (was?) a utility that would flip individual F keys on the Mac, although it’s been years since I used it and who knows if it still works post Apple Silicon transition.

TBH, I kind of miss the touch bar. Once they restored the esc key, it was often kind of useful while I tend not to use any of the keys in the F row (even those mapped by IntelliJ since the whole fn+F key thing is a kind of a pain and I seldom have call for the media buttons—actually I just realized I do occcasionally use the mute/unmute feature but that’s about it).

Of course my preferences are normative and anyone who does otherwise is clearly abnormal ;-)

Terretta · 2026-01-07T20:29:52 1767817792

The Touch Bar was so useless* it's now selling like hotcakes as an accessory:

“Trigger actions, launch apps, and control your entire setup—all from a hyper-customizable deck of vibrant LCD keys.”

https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/stream-deck

* Narrator: Not actually useless. Mine is setup for multi-screen chat/video/notes windows placement and app window sharing for video conferencing.

manarth · 2026-01-08T08:44:35 1767861875

    > "There is (was?) a utility that would flip individual F keys on the Mac"

Function Flip: https://kevingessner.com/software/functionflip/

Terretta · 2026-01-07T20:28:33 1767817713

Wait — what button is this?

Oh: [moon|F6]

“If you are smugly thinking to yourself, “I knew that!”, Then, my question to you is, why didn’t you tell ME???” — https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2023/09/do-not-disturb-key/

It goes on to answer the next question:

“But that got me to wondering how long the F6 has had a dedicated Do Not Disturb function. I did some research and it looks like it was introduced when Apple came out with the first Apple Silicon MacBook Air in 2020. The previous keyboard shortcuts had F4 key dedicated to Launchpad, and if you had a backlit keyboard, F5 and F6 were dedicated to up/down keyboard brightness keys.”