I will never buy another laptop with a "short" right-shift key and the up-arrow next to it. For coding, it SUCKS to miss hit that and I never got use to it on the one laptop I've had with a keyboard like that.
I must admit that I've never used such a keyboard before, but it seems better to me than half-height arrow keys, or heaven forbid, half-height Up and Down arrows but full-height Left and Right arrows, what an abomination!
What I don't understand, if they're going to include a numeric keypad on the right, is why they didn't make the bottom of the numeric keypad the arrow keys. Looking at [1], 2 should be Up, 0 should be Down, Right should be Left, . should be Right. So Num Lock should be Insert, 7 should be Delete, / should be Home, 8 should be End, * should be PageUp, 9 should be PageDown.
I'd imagine that most techies use the arrow keys and Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys a lot more than the numeric keys, why not make that the primary layout, and be numeric keys only when Num Lock is on?
Am I crazy? Or does nobody give keyboards one ounce of thought ever?
I have had both the short right shift and the half-height arrow keys on different laptops, and the half-height arrow keys are by FAR preferable for me. Much less mistyping that way. Granted, I don't do much gaming on a laptop (although I doubt I'd use the arrow keys that much for that anyways, probably ASDW).
But I totally agree that the people putting keyboards together don't seem to actually spend much thought and definitely don't user test it with representative users, including keyboard-centric users like coders.
Why on earth should they make the numpad keys double as arrow keys?!? Then you couldn't navigate and enter numbers in, say, a spreadsheet without futzing around with NumLock all the time! Utterly ridiculous idea. That keyboard in your pic looks pretty perfect as it is.
I hate to break it to you, but the numeric keys already double as arrow keys on that "perfect" keyboard.
Besides, this is a laptop running Linux, what do you think is the more likely target audience? People entering numbers in a spreadsheet, or people doing software development?
Most of the comments here are people complaining that the numeric keypad is there at all.
> I hate to break it to you, but the numeric keys already double as arrow keys on that "perfect" keyboard.
I hate to break it to you, but they can't be both simultaneously. They only "double" if you have a mind-reading genie hovering above your shoulder and pressing NumLock for you whenever you need to switch from arrow-mode to number-mode and vice versa. I don't have one of those; do you?
> Besides, this is a laptop running Linux, what do you think is the more likely target audience? People entering numbers in a spreadsheet, or people doing software development?
A) This Clevo-clone keyboard is exactly the same as on Clevo-clone Windows boxes. Windows spreadsheet users outnumber Linux software developers substantially, so that's who the market produces hardware for.
A) Personally, I kind of do both; I often (well OK... But not exactly rarely) use a spreadsheet full of numbers to generate code.
C) One gets the feeling that the main driver behind this particular comment was contempt for the ordinary spreadsheet-using "sheeple". At least, condescension seems to come naturally to you, Mr. I-hate-to-break-it-to-you.
> Most of the comments here are people complaining that the numeric keypad is there at all.
Sure. And they are (quite rightfully) clamouring for keyboards without one... But what does that have to do with this? Not wanting a numpad at all is a very different (and far less misguided) idea than severely crippling the usability of both the separate arrow keys and numpad on keyboards that have one, which is what your suggestion boils down to.
