That said (author here), I actually use a 65% for daily use. The 40% was too small for me to use comfortably. I could get used to the caps lock for arrow keys and text editing stuff, but having to remember shortcuts to type a semicolon just wasn't for me.
I can understand why people use 60/70% keyboards. I personally couldn't give up the numpad, home/end/pgup/pgdown/arrow keys for it, but there's definitely something to be said for the comfort level of having the mouse less far off from the keyboard.
I think once you're into anything less than 60%, either you literally just type text and use the mouse/touchpad items instead of keyboard shortcuts, or you're more focused in the aesthetic minimalism rather than the functionality.
I've had my eye on a few 40% builds as of late, so I'll throw another option into your list here: portability. I'm looking for a keyboard that I can throw in my laptop bag that isn't miserable to type on. I had a Microsoft Designer Keyboard for a while but it's worse than my laptop keyboard, so I'm back to the drawing board, and this seems like where I'm landing.
I use a tiling window manager, emacs+evil-mode, and firefox+vimperator with a keyboard.io atreus (44 keys ergonomic) and it's basically fine if you go "all in"? sometimes I have to struggle to find the layer with the F-keys spread out like a numpad on my right hand, but I don't really use them and have their features bound to shortcuts that are easier to find, and that's probably most of the reason.
I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard to do stuff like navigate text simply, pause/mute music (instead my pinky goes to the bottom of the keyboard and all the keys on the other hand change function), my software can all be driven from the "common" keybindings and modifiers like ctrl/alt/win are on my thumbs instead of being offset below my pinkies.
Importantly, i can throw it in my bag with my laptop and use it when i am traveling so there is very little context-switching that has to occur.
None of this really carries over when I boot in to windows, though, and I keep a ten-keyless keyboard around for playing video games.
I made a split keyboard for me (I need to write up that post at some point), and I just made holding out the tilde convert the right half (yuihjknm,) to a numpad. It works great, since I don't use any other keys while using the numpad, and I get to save all that space and switches for something I rarely use.
So my mouse is _very_ right handed. I have some smaller symmetrical mice that are less comfortable. I'm curious how this change worked for you - Did you get a leftie mouse? Did you swap the buttons?
I used a 50% (Preonic, so 5x12 1u keys, with an option to use a 2u spacebar by sacrificing a slot on the bottom row) for a while, so:
The switches felt great to use (chosen myself), the keycaps were still easily customizable to an office-appropriate yet imo stylish theme, and the default layout was intelligently designed to where most functionality was already within reach of your fingers.
Functionality would be in 'layers'. While they're usually numbered, I think of them as 'Alternate Shift', where normal Shift is 'up 1' (CAPITALS, and !@#$%^), and other layers can be whatever you want, i.e. `Layer2 A` = "{", `Layer2 S` = "}". The layout is set by the (often customizable) firmware.
I stopped using it when I changed to a 100% remote job, but keep it as a display piece.
There are layers which can be used and the layout minimizes the need to stretch and angle fingers for keys. However I tried the Planck EZ ortholinear keyboard and it was terrible. I felt like I was huddled over the keyboard like a chipmunk eating an acorn. For me, I discovered that what I really wanted was a split keyboard and that the number of keys to reach was not my problem. The configurability of the Planck EZ was amazing, but I was really looking for comfort and ergonomics.
Just adding effort to add additional keys using capslock.
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