People can swear up and down how intuitive and natural layers are, but I do not care. If there is ever a decision to be made between more and fewer keys, I always want to default to more.
The trade-off from fewer keys is reduced hand movement (& a smaller keyboard, cheaper to buy switches for, etc.), at the cost of additional complexity of use, & it not really being easy for anyone else to use your keyboard.
It seems reasonable either way to prefer one or the other. -- I suspect that most of the people enthusiastic about the smaller keyboard layouts are also into keyboard-driven workflows, and are developers who also frequently need to use the symbols accessed using layers.
I could imagine that some people never use the function keys. Or never use the numpad keys. To some people they might be completely useless... Which would make a smaller keyboard understandable.
Now, people who do need all those keys and yet still go for a smaller keyboard is harder for me to understand. :)
> The trade-off from fewer keys is reduced hand movement (& a smaller keyboard, cheaper to buy switches for, etc.), at the cost of additional complexity of use, & it not really being easy for anyone else to use your keyboard.
The trade-offs seem a bit one-sided. Hand movements are not a big deal unless you are going constantly back and forth between the main part and the nav cluster or the numpad. And all of these custom keyboards with their 60%, 67.5%, etc. sizes are already so… boutique and expensive that I don’t think that people are forfeiting a dozen or so keys in order to save some money.
For instance, you could configure your number keys to have a "press and hold" generate the corresponding F key. The 'hold' doesn't have to be very long to still easily distinguish it from "normal" typing.
You could also make it a key combo very easily. Anyone who doesn't like key combos should take up a war against !@#$%^&*()+_?:<>{} and their friends.
