[tetraodonpuffer]

I completely agree, after a small bout of CTS / tendinitis I switched to the original MS natural keyboard and it's still going strong at home for 20 (!) years now.

At work I ended up with a natural keyboard 4000, which has a layout nearly as good as the original, and much better than the other various iterations that happened in the meantime with non-standard cursor or pgup/down cluster keys.

I would be completely willing to spend a few hundred dollars on a keyboard with mechanical switches in that exact layout but of course usb and with a bunch of extra keys to xmodmap as needed (say, like the as/400 keyboards) but there aren't any to be had in the market.

It would be even more amazing to have a natural keyboard with mechanical switches and oled keys, but who knows if that will ever happen.

[to3m]

Yes. 24 function keys would be a start, plus some more down the left-hand side. Maybe a 3-state numlock, whereby you could get ten more from the numpad.

But, no. It appears the way to make the keyboard more useful is not to give people more keys, nor even just to give them the same set they're used to, but to take them away, and then shuffle around the ones that are left.

Funny... you'd think that for an activity that relies on muscle memory - such as, say, typing - this would be exactly the sort of thing that people would be paying a bit more attention to not doing.

Maybe it's supposed to be some kind of vendor lock-in strategy. One of those vendor lock-in strategies that even Microsoft feels would be a step too far.