[rgoulter]

> omitting "unnecessary" keys .... without removing my hands from the home row

The "keep hands on home row" is the motivation behind omitting the "unnecessary" keys, at least for the keyboards which use a small spacebar and give the thumbs more keys to use.

With those small 36-key keyboards, your hands pretty much have nowhere to go except to remain on home row.

> as many keys as possible

I once saw someone made a keyboard with 450 keys. https://relivesight.com/projects/433/

[qwerty456127]

I don't really care that much about the home row (although it's nice to have something right in it so I mentioned). I care about being able to do everything by pressing less keys. Meanwhile a language I often type in (and I type in quite a number of them regularly) has the digits row remapped for extra letters so I can't enter a digit with a single key press without a keypad (I prefer moving a hand to there over using modifier keys). I also make heavy use of F1-12 keys and I have long thin fingers so I woudn't even mind an additional row of keys. Using the mouse every time I want to adjust the sound volume or do something like this is annoying as well. Needless to say I actively use Home, End, PgUp, PgDn and Insert (many compact keyboards lack some of these). At last but not at least, for sake of the muscle memory, I would prefer all the keys to be located at the same places on all the keyboards rather than moved to whatever a place the vendor has been able to fit them in.

[Mizoguchi]

These small keyboards are usually ortholinear which also helps reducing hand movement.

I switched to a OLKB Preonic over a year ago and haven't looked back.

After you get used to the smaller factor and non staggered keys format you realize how ridiculously and unnecessarily huge and clunky traditional keyboards are, even laptop keyboards.

It's like traveling with a 65 liters bag for years before you learn you can just carry a 40L and travel with less crap and much lighter.

It took me a couple of months to come up with the layout that worked for me (and even today I still optimizing it), but once I figured it out the typing experience became just such much better.

The QMK configuration tool makes the process of configuring the layout painless and super quick, so you just need the patience to try and iterate.

[sleepybrett]

less keys = more cognitive overhead. Having to remember what layer i put fucking pipe on is not better than just hitting the damn key.

In ~2000 I started suffering from tendonitis and my coding job became very painful, I tried kind of the 'easy onramp' ergo options at the time, namely the ms 'natural'. It did not help. Eventually someone pointed me at the kinesis advantage (then essential) and I bought one. After some struggle coming to terms with thumb keys and wells and ortholinerness I switched to it for all tasks except for gaming and my symptoms basically disapeared.

About 10 years back I was in a job that was potentially going to cause me to travel a lot, at that point I had already modded my kinesis advange keyboards with custom controllers and wanted to try and build something that travelled better, was smaller, while still not fucking up my wrists.

I built a lot of keyboards trying to shrink my luggage. I went ortho and built a split preonic, uncomfortable, then I went down the road that leads to corne/iris/etc (thumb keys, vertically aligned but not horizontally aligned). More comfortable but the thing i always ran into when removing keys. Overhead, you have to remember what layer and key you put xyz rarely used symbol on (and when you are a software engineer that's a lot of the symbols).. at the end of the road I built a very low profile board based on the dactyl with the same number of keys as the kinesis advantage minus the f-key chicklets. Reducing the number of layers i have to remember to 1 that only contains the grave and the fkeys.

Then covid hit and I didn't have to travel anywhere. I take my dactyl when I go see my parents, and unloaded most of my other boards for cheap. (i kept a 65 that I play games with)

[rgoulter]

> less keys = more cognitive overhead.

Right.

The benefits of reducing hand travel / stretching come at the cost of additional complexity. Not everyone will be comfortable with that complexity.

I find the complexity acceptable; and in many ways more coherent than traditional layouts. e.g. I'd keep slash and backslash (/\) adjacent (or otherwise paired); a question mark (?) is frequent enough even in prose; so, pipe (|) remains paired to backslash. -- But, yeah, it can be annoying for keys which are used very infrequently.

[sleepybrett]

i have almost 0 hand travel on my kinesis advantage. It lacks f-keys (layered on the numrow) and it has another layer for a keypad (front printed on the keys .. square of u-p m-/)... but also zmk so I could reprogram it if I wanted. It's a 76 ( if I'm counting right) key layout.