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

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…

Solution 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

Solution 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