I recently bought a "ninja" keyboard, where the labels are on the front of the keys, not the top. Looks "badass" according to a nearby 15-year-old. While technically the keys are labeled, in practice looking at them is useless, especially in anything less than bright room lighting, so they are, for me, effectively blank.
As a reasonably fast touch typist for many years, I found that for prose it was basically no change. But. There were enough things that were a total drag that I couldn't keep using it.
There are times when the key you need to hit isn't part of a flow, and you have to hit it perfectly: passwords, Illustrator/Photoshop commands, punctuation-heavy inputs like URLs, postal addresses, etc. I'm not a programmer, and others will have other things they do.
So, I bought normal keycaps and replaced them on just the letter and number keys. Much better.
As a reasonably fast touch typist for many years, I found that for prose it was basically no change. But. There were enough things that were a total drag that I couldn't keep using it.
There are times when the key you need to hit isn't part of a flow, and you have to hit it perfectly: passwords, Illustrator/Photoshop commands, punctuation-heavy inputs like URLs, postal addresses, etc. I'm not a programmer, and others will have other things they do.
So, I bought normal keycaps and replaced them on just the letter and number keys. Much better.