[reflexco]

Ergonomics is not vanity. Most 100% keyboards don't allow you to have one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse with good posture, which I'm sure for the average user is a more common thing to do than entering long strings of numbers.

[Festro]

One of my first jobs involved assessing desktop users for ergonomic posture when using video display units (PCs). I get that a big keyboard could splay your arms out a bit at angles that aren't ergonomic but practically speaking that'd have to be a very big keyboard.

When someone moves from keyboard to mouse they should be moving from their elbow joint, to protect their wrists. If anything a numpad encourages this as your resting dominant hand position will be left of the numpad (if right handed, for left hand users this won't be true). So you can't bend your wrist to reach your mouse from that position, you have to move your whole arm - which is good.

VDU guidelines in the UK at least don't specify a bad angle for elbows, just wrist bending (up, down, and sideways) because it's not a common scope for elbows to be bending that far for common tasks at a desk. Certainly a full size keyboard and mouse don't push it that far.

So I don't see the ergonomic issue there. I'm sitting at a full size keyboard with my mouse in hand and my posture is just fine. I could even space them out more and be comfortable.

Obviously mileage varies, and subjectively maybe a smaller person might have a smaller desk footprint. I don't want to go as far as to disregard someone else's experience but it really does seem far fetched.

Nothing wrong with liking small keyboards for other reasons though, like vanity, neatness, tidying away easily, portability, not needing a numpad, etc.