4 ms·

This thing seems so silly. If you're going to drop down to something like a Lily58, why is the nav cluster the thing you cling to? Why not add an extra row to b

This thing seems so silly. If you're going to drop down to something like a Lily58, why is the nav cluster the thing you cling to? Why not add an extra row to bring in the f keys, and make it a full 75% board?

alpaca128 5y ago
Agreed. Once you're used to arrow keys on the homerow you never want to go back to dedicated arrow keys.
- sleepybrett 5y ago
  Disagree strongly. I spent about 6 months traveling with a 60% in my bag (1st gen touchbar keyboard is the absolute worst). I had it configured fairly typically (split spacebar but no arrow cluster). I had arrow clusters mapped to layer+wasd and layer+ijkl. It never became comfortable. My travel keyboard got upgraded to a 65%. Still use a kinesis advantage at home (it's just too big to pack for short trips). I've built a dactyl, I may start traveling with it instead (if I every have to go back to travel).
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    To be fair I'm a Vim user and so hjkl feels natural to me. I just also have to hold my right thumb down. Not sure how others do it, but on standard keyboards I've always struggled with accurately moving my hands; for example one journey to the arrow cluster and back meant my right hand usually landed on the wrong row or column if I wasn't looking. All issues of that kind just disappeared when I started using a keyboard actually designed for human hands and reduced hand/wrist movement. But the reason custom keyboards exist is exactly because different people want different things, and that's fine.
    - rgoulter 5y ago
      > Not sure how others do it, but on standard keyboards I've always struggled with accurately moving my hands To the best of my memory, I just accurately moved my hands even as far as the \| or =/+ keys. Using arrow keys would've required quickly feeling for the arrow-key cluster before using it. Now that I'm on a split keyboard with a reduced number of keys, I think people vastly discount how difficult/awkward it is to accurately use the standard keyboard layout for programming without looking at the keyboard.
    - fierro 5y ago
      what keyboard do you use? And do you feel it's optimized for Vim?

alpaca128 5y ago

Agreed. Once you're used to arrow keys on the homerow you never want to go back to dedicated arrow keys.

sleepybrett 5y ago
Disagree strongly. I spent about 6 months traveling with a 60% in my bag (1st gen touchbar keyboard is the absolute worst). I had it configured fairly typically (split spacebar but no arrow cluster). I had arrow clusters mapped to layer+wasd and layer+ijkl. It never became comfortable. My travel keyboard got upgraded to a 65%. Still use a kinesis advantage at home (it's just too big to pack for short trips). I've built a dactyl, I may start traveling with it instead (if I every have to go back to travel).
- alpaca128 5y ago
  To be fair I'm a Vim user and so hjkl feels natural to me. I just also have to hold my right thumb down. Not sure how others do it, but on standard keyboards I've always struggled with accurately moving my hands; for example one journey to the arrow cluster and back meant my right hand usually landed on the wrong row or column if I wasn't looking. All issues of that kind just disappeared when I started using a keyboard actually designed for human hands and reduced hand/wrist movement. But the reason custom keyboards exist is exactly because different people want different things, and that's fine.
  - rgoulter 5y ago
    > Not sure how others do it, but on standard keyboards I've always struggled with accurately moving my hands To the best of my memory, I just accurately moved my hands even as far as the \| or =/+ keys. Using arrow keys would've required quickly feeling for the arrow-key cluster before using it. Now that I'm on a split keyboard with a reduced number of keys, I think people vastly discount how difficult/awkward it is to accurately use the standard keyboard layout for programming without looking at the keyboard.
  - fierro 5y ago
    what keyboard do you use? And do you feel it's optimized for Vim?