[momania]

As a programmer you need (or actually want) to make use of some of the most acrobatic shortcuts that cross a large portion of the keyboard. Having a smaller keyboard just makes that a lot more comfortable, because you don't need to have hands the size of King Kong to be able to utilise those shortcuts. :-)

[varispeed]

Do you have examples of such shortcuts? Apart from CTRL+C/X and CTRL+V I can't think of any useful?

[selfhoster11]

Lots of IDEs have complicated keyboard chords. For IntelliJ, there's Alt+[1..9], Shift+F6, Ctrl+Alt+L, and others on a daily basis. Some of them cross basically the entire keyboard, and it's not convenient to use one hand to do so.

[douglaswlance]

Anything a computer can do can be assigned to a shortcut.

[bregma]

Use vim and the command line. Why would I need anything other than a full-size mechanical clicky keyboard with full travel? My hands rarely stray off the home row.