3 ms·

Thanks, you just gave me a reason why some peope may not like numpads on their keyboards. As a left-handed person I never realised that the numpad is where you

• aasasd 6y ago
  I'm a rightie, but I periodically move the mouse to the other side, partly to avoid too much RSI and partly exactly because the numpad was in the way—especially with MS' ‘Natural 4000’ keyboard that takes half the desk. With the ‘Sculpt’ keyboard I finally learned how much space there is. Combined with the fact that the numpad for me is pretty much completely useless outside of entering one-time codes for online purchases and Steam login—I'm quite grateful that it's a separate unit on Sculpt. That's all despite the fact that I'm a programmer and supposed to love the digits: purportedly that's how they ended up in ‘lowercase’ on the second-top row of the keyboard, i.e. pressed without the shift key (and Apple managed to stick dot and comma in the upper register on that row, in my language's layout). I actually tried to change the mapping so that the symbols are entered without shift, but somehow that breaks a lot of muscle memory of which I didn't even know. I'm vaguely curious about one setup that seemingly would be especially ergonomic: an Advantage keyboard with a trackpad in the middle. There's almost exactly enough space for a trackpad there, and I've seen kludgey setups that slap a trackpad on an Advantage. A less-ideal split keyboard like Freestyle would probably work too. Meanwhile, semi-portable keyboards like Microsoft's ‘All-In-One’ still go the tired staggered flat-board path and attach a trackpad at the end, despite the opportunity.