And surprisingly it’s going pretty well. I’m late to the fad I think, but only a few weeks ago I thought it was bananas to not have arrow keys. Then I learned about the whole tiny-keyboard world, and decided to go for it.
The keyboard I’m using is a Ferris Sweep, which as free and open hardware you may produce yourself.
At the moment I have 9 layers, 7 of them in frequent use. The learning process has been surprisingly not bad. And using QMK I have tweaked the key map a lot already.
If you use a computer a lot, say for your job, it’s worth optimizing how you interact with it.
Fair enough. For me I’m figuring out if the keys I don’t use are actually not useful, or if I don’t use them because they’re hard to reach. For example if I want to use the volume up button, or maybe press F9, I usually would need to look down. Using layers brings all the keys closer and therefore makes them relevant. Macros are also a powerful avenue, but that’s available on any size kb.
Yes, that definitely makes sense. I would just add that for both in the case of F9 and Volume Up they’d be on the second layer on a 60% board because it doesn’t include the F keys row. So it probably wouldn’t make a difference in those cases, but I get the point.
I think in the case of a 60% the furthest keys to reach might be the right Control and maybe the 6 and 7 keys depending on how long your fingers are. In my case I would say I almost never use the right control and right super keys. I think they’re bound to some layer that changes the lighting on the keyboard or something.