I wish I could remove the insert key, but unlike the caps-lock that no application rebinds, insert does get rebound. I wish there was an OS level control "pressing insert by accident should not turn on mangle-my-text-mode".

> I've switched to programmable ergo keyboards where there's a whole slew of options

The best part of these kinds of keyboards is they provide each thumb two keys each.

That allows for the keyboards to be much more expressive, as well as not needing the pinky for keys like backspace/enter/esc.

Aren't layers a form of stateful control?

You sound like you would prefer Emacs over Vim.

"I've always hated stateful control. Always ripped out caps lock key from my boards (or later figured out remapping), same for insert mode"

You want some real fun, try the Microsoft Surface keyboard. Maybe they've fixed in a very recent version, but given how long the product line has had this problem, probably not. It has a stateful Fn key. That's right, a Fn key that works like capslock. There is no conceivable way this is a good idea. It means that if you actually want to use both "sides" of the Fn'd keys, you literally can not build muscle memory. If you hold the Fn key and press one of those keys, it'll do the "other" function, but if you just tap the Fn key, including because you had meant to press one of the keys but decided not to halfway through (which happens all the time, you just don't normally notice it because it's a completely normal thing to do that normally carries no consequences), you flip the polarity of the entire Fn key set. Now a normal press and a Fn-press do the opposite things. Until you flip it again.

This is not a "oh, as a multi-decade key user I have opinions about whether key strokes should be 68dB or 72dB" question. This is basic functioning of the keyboard. It's insane.

And, naturally, the key is "magic" and the OS can't see it. While I'm bitching, what is the deal with keyboards on new laptops needing special drivers? What the fuck is so special about your keyboard that you need drivers for it? I'll tell you what's so special about it: stuff you shouldn't be doing anyhow. My OS should be able to see and address all keys so I can remap them as needed. Your stupid special key that does your stupid special thing doesn't need to be a stupid special key. Make it a normal key and trigger your behavior in Windows, not in the hardware. Then I can use your stupid special key at least as a Meta or a Hyper or something. You don't need special drivers to have normal keys, you only need special drivers if you're doing something stupid.

So there's no fixing the Fn key on these systems because it's one of the magic keys that can't be seen by the OS at all, so it can't be remapped, it can't be turned off, it can't be locked into one state, you can't do anything. You're just stuck with a keyboard that, from your brain's point of view, randomly swaps a couple of dozen keys around.

Now I'm also on a programmable keyboard. This guy, to be precise: https://mistelkeyboard.com/products/0a26d32ac1e3b1d2af2896e0... which I split across my chair so I've got one half under each hand when it is resting comfortably. That's something you can't get a laptop keyboard to do.

Another option (he's using Windows) is "change what the power buttons do" in Control Panel to make the sleep button into a no-op.

My Dell has it too, thank goodness.

We had keyboards like this in several labs in the uni! Except they were even worse, and these three keys were shaped like regular keys. When I accidentally powered down my PC the third time in a row, losing all progress on my assignment, I popped the key out of the keyboard.

Fn down and up arrows only good fn.

Yes, normally a BIOS setting on laptops I think. Before changing it I was hitting sleep constantly since they'd put it on F1, jammed up next to escape.

You can remap the keys so that "Special: Power" key button does nothing.. Or even to the original function (on my keyboard it would mean Volume Down would be F12 instead).

One Windows software to do that: https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys / https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/xpffcg7m673d4f?hl=en-US

On Linux, heck it's Linux, for sure it's doable.

My Framework 13 also has this option for some reason, even though my ctrl key is on the outside

I find the "wrong" FN keyboards annoying like OP, but the Home/End to Pgup/Dn grouping of keys is what really makes or breaks a great keyboard layout for me.

when i was a teen the "sleep" button was just right of the enter key so if you slipped, which i often did, night night computer.

Apple is hardly the first to have used "natural" scrolling.

While I have no idea who was, I do know that John Ousterhout's text editor and terminal emulators Mx and Tx used "natural scrolling", made pre-1989. Their scroll mechanism is shift + left/right click then drag, using "natural scrolling", e.g. push mouse up to scroll down. Left click scrolls normally, right click scrolls quickly.

I go out of my way to enable "natural scrolling" on every device I use (it is possible on Windows!) because I've never been able to stand the opposite.

Are you talking about the dual rows of 12 function keys across the top, as in the old mainframe 3270 terminals?

Or the "Model F" keyboard with the two vertical rows of 5 keys on the left edge of the keyboard?

For me, full-size function keys are the minimum. Granted that real-estate is at a premium on laptops but this isn't an impossible ask IMO.

Only tangentially related, but I've found myself down a rabbit hole with some ancient BigKeys keyboards (designed/manufactured by Greystone Digital), and a small handful of them have a physical switch on their underside that switches them between QWERTY and ASDF layout; it's genuinely perplexing because the code theyre running on the boards is not at all standard PS/2 or USB (save a few later revisions/models). There is a DFK48 V1.2 (mfg 1994) that I have been fighting with for some time now, and it angers me to no end.

The lengths that peripheral manufacturers will go to to create "functionality" is wild, having looked at hardware like this for the first time. Granted, I'm working with what is widely considered an accessibility HID, the fact that "stickey keys" (as theyre known in Windows) is a default function of this keyboard, which breaks all common passive PS/2 -> USB adapters due to encoding differences, significantly fucks up my workflow in using it with modern hardware by using unique encodings AFAICT. It's a wonderful puzzle, but an annoyance for someone trying to accomplish anything.

I'm confident this shit could be oneshot with LLMs, but that's not the point of the work, in case anyone was considering chiming in about them.

Part of me needs to realize that this was made 30+ years ago, before we knew what we now know. But another part of me feels intense animosity for such early, unabashed, and shameless abandon in regards to HID standards/protocols. Using what is effectively Stickey Keys by default and breaking PS/2 -> USB adaptability because of that is annoying as hell, even if the thing is $50 on ebay.

I think "natural" feels right on a touch pad but, I have a standard/wired KBM setup for working and a wireless keyboard with "touch pad" for sitting on the couch. That "touch pad" registers itself as a "mouse". OSes let you pick different scroll directions for mouse and touch pad, not specific devices. I have to switch manually when it bugs me enough. Just can't win. There is no perfect keyboard. Someone please prove me wrong.

It's not just the ergonomics - in my head I'm moving the cursor (and with it my view) down through the document, not moving the document up. Which is mentally different from a touchscreen, though I expect people who grew up with touchscreens never built that mental association that we're moving the cursor. Fortunately Apple allows be to change it. <end old-man-mode>

> It is so useful I could never get another keyboard that doesn’t have a similar functionality.

I do it at the software level (Linux / Xorg): complete remapping, with an "hyper" key modifier etc.

The reason I do it at the software level is that you can pry my Topre switches from my cold dead hands and the HHKB Pro JP I'm using doesn't have, by default, a programmable controller. Now I know some people mod their Topre keyboards to add a programmable controller but I never got to that point.

Doing so in hardware using .xkb files is... Something. I know way more about .xkb files than I should but, thankfully, so far I've just been able to brink my .xkb file to every new Linux version (supporting Xorg, I'm not on Wayland).

I take at some point I'll look more into how to mod my HHKB keyboards with programmable controller.

You need Fn anyway because even 16" now come without a navigation block and even if you have it (asus tm420 though they ditched that too) you have no way to make PrtScr, Break, ScrollLock.

The real atrocity is placing it on the left side when 90% of the most used combos are on the right eg Fn+arrows for paging and home/end.

It could be way better if Fn was on the place of ContextMenu - Thinkpad already used it for the stupid PrtScr and now even more stupid Copilot key.

Thinkpad laptops thankfully have the option to switch Fn and Ctrl Key in the bios, because that Fn in the bottem left is reserved by my muscle memory to ctrl and I won't change that.

Apple, to my knowledge, never sold a mouse with a wheel. Their first mouse with scrolling was the Mighty Mouse, which used a small trackball to simulate a touch surface. It was spring mounted and would fall flush when scrolling oven a sensation similar to the Magic Mouse (this is my favortite mouse and the one I still use today). The Magic Mouse extended on this idea by replacing the ball with a multitouch trackpad.

In either scenario, “natural scroll” feels like you’re pulling on the surface which maps directly to sliding on the screen.

It makes less sense if you think about a wheel pulling the page beneath it.

On a Macbook, natural scrolling feels right on the touchpad. The real crime is not having a separate setting for a mouse. I had to use applescript tied to a keybind so I can use natural scrolling on the touchpad and toggle to regular scrolling when using a mouse wheel.

It makes sense on a trackpad too which is what the majority of sold Macs come with. You’re “pushing” the document, not moving the scroll bars. Seems perfectly natural to me. My fingers move up, the document moves up; just like what would happen to a piece of paper being slid up a table.

Yes, it’s less direct than touching the screen, but it makes more sense for the model of UI they’ve been going for over the last 20 years where the content of the window is more meaningful than the window itself, which is to say worrying about where the scroll bars are rather than what part of the document you’re looking at is what’s not natural.

No, it's because a lot of the time you want to use a different keyboard layout. For instance with international keyboards.

The Das keyboard commits the sin of having a sleep button (why is it even on the keyboard??) right next to the media controls. I've accidentally hit that multiple times when trying to change my music.

Thanks for the idea! Now I'm going to mash the Fn key whenever I feel the urge to strongly emphasize something but can't actually type it out because, well, it would be Fn NSFW.

Apple's just doing what's on the agenda, plugging the analog hole. Your TV doesn't have a headphone jack any more either. TVs haven't had this in decades.

Reasonable-sounding arguments always come up in these debates, but in reality it all comes down to what you’re used to.

Disabling natural scrolling used to be the first thing I did on a new system. Until I once was too lazy to do it, got used to it, and now I can’t imagine ever going back.

Possibly, depending on how they're activated. If the layer is only activated while another key is pressed, that's not stateful (i.e. no different from yet another Fn key). I'd say that layer toggles and one-shot key modifiers are stateful control, yes.

Personally, I've found that I prefer layer shift keys over layer toggles. It takes more mental effort to track in which layer I'm working than to hold a key while pressing another. The only persistent layer toggles I use is to switch the entire keyset to a different layout (qwerty vs workman vs single-handed, or switch the right half to numpad).

I tend to go for keyboards that don't need all of that messing about with the Fn key, too.

By the way: It's a lot more than 100 keys. People tend to accept that because they have what is called a '105-key' keyboard that it actually has 105 keys. One of my '105-key' keyboards has 124 physical keys. For approaching a decade now, I've wanted a 127-key keyboard from Brazil. Formally, that's a '107-key' keyboard.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499899

A tool to help manage these kinds of rebindings is the Keyboard Manager in PowerToys.

As I recall it uses multiple approaches, so it isn't "just" a straight manager of scancode maps, but that also helps it avoid logout/reboot for the initial change to take place.

> not needing the pinky for keys like backspace/enter/esc.

Probably not so efficient in terms of WPM, but after my previous issues with RSI, I somehow ended up pressing those keys with my middle fingers instead of my pinkie. Usually multiple fingers hit the key simultaneously, either long finger + ring finger or long finger + index finger.

Requires more hand movement but certainly more comfortable.

Caps Lock is stateful control. The function of the keys changes depending on the internal state of the system. The "Fn" key on the keyboard in the article is also stateful (ish), and defaults to treating the F row as the special macros, rather than just F1-12.

Keyboard layers work more like the Shift key.

Layers are usually quasi modes, i.e. the non default state requires an active holding of a modifier key.

> While I'm bitching, what is the deal with keyboards on new laptops needing special drivers?

The only laptops I've encountered with this are... Microsoft's. Somehow the Surface folks can't get enough of their critical drivers in-box with Windows to be able to re-install from stock media.

(IIRC it goes even deeper with USB drivers missing, but I gave up on Surface Laptops a few year ago)

I have a mac, and I wouldn't mind a fn-lock feature, but only from a different key combo, maybe fn+capslock. The behavior of fn (media keys or function keys) is a control panel setting, so I could probably whip up something with hammerspoon. But right now I just remap most things in my IDE so they don't require function keys.

Anyway, keyboards have needed drivers since we stopped using BIOS to read them, and fancy keyboards with macros tend to need at least a userspace daemon, but yeah this kind of thing should be as much a commodity as a VGA framebuffer is, something you just shouldn't have to fuss with. Far as I know though, USB and the *HCI zoo pretty much are that, so along with the OS's own built-in support, it should support the basic functionality of any keyboard, and provide standard means for extension. I believe the main reason any company ships a 1GB keyboard "driver" these days is the bundled shovelware and spyware.

I agree about the special keys. There are so many HID usages on the Consumer page for keyboards covering so many things, from application launchers to extra editing functions, and it is absurd how often almost none of them are used in favour of vendor-private usage numbers that then require vendor-specific software support.

I think the distinction __s is making is between layer toggles (layer is active between layer key presses, described as stateful) vs layer modifiers (layer is active while layer key is held).

And there are definitely reasons to minimize keyboard state. I've been playing around with programmable keyboards (running RMK in my case) with several thumb keys. My thumb was getting fatigued, so I tried using a layer toggle to avoid having to hold it while using the nav layer. I would hit it by accident and then get confused about why my keyboard isn't doing what I expect ("mode confusion"). That gets awkward, unproductive, and embarrassing real fast. You can display the mode via per-key LEDs and/or an OLED display, but those only help if you actually look down at the keyboard, which is not my habit. (I have thought about using a companion app to display an overlay on my computer's screen when in a non-default layer.)

fwiw, I think most of my thumb fatigue was from using my thumb on modifier keys beneath z/x/c and equivalent on the right, which required folding my thumb underneath my palm. Bad idea.

These keyboard designs have some really interesting ideas, but the ideas aren't all unambiguously good. Some of what are described as thumb keys really shouldn't be used with the thumb. I'm still on the fence about column stagger. I think a lot of the reason people avoid the number row on these keyboards is because the purely vertical reach on a column-staggered keyboard is more awkward than the diagonal movement you make on a row-staggered keyboard. And the idea that column stagger is better because it forces you to use e.g. the ring finger for "c" is based on an idea that it's bad to use the index finger for "c" even with a row-staggered keyboard, and I disagree with that. I also think they're undervaluing muscle memory (or maybe were made for people who never learned to type well on a row-staggered keyboard and are really committed to always using the column-staggered keyboard).

Sort of.

The downside from the 'state' from Caps Lock is you have to keep track of whether it's active or not.

Whereas with layers, typically a layer will only be active if you're holding down some kind of "activate layer" key.

Emacs key sequences are similarly stateful, and GP may hate that just as much, even if the state is temporary.

For my part, in emacs I would often try ctrl-x-s to save, but miss the x. When I repeat the attempt, emacs register the complete but unknown key sequence ctrl-s-x followed by the start of a new key sequence with ctrl-s. I consider this similarly stateful because the behavior of "ctrl-s" changes entirely depending on what keystroke (if any) preceded it.

I mostly agree with GP on stateful controls, but emacs has never clicked for me like vim did. Perhaps it's because switching between modes feels more natural than a simple toggle.

I always viewed the classic scroll method as a mirror to what happens on screen.

Thinking about it some more, it really is about consistency regarding the cursor. On my trackpad, not in "natural scrolling" mode, I get this:

  - One finger down moves the cursor down through the text.
  - Two fingers down moves the cursor down through the text (moving the text up)
  - Thumb-click plus one finger down moves the cursor down through the text (and selects).

in Natural Scrolling you get:

  - One finger down moves the cursor down through the text.
  - Two fingers down moves the cursor up through the text (moving the text down)
  - Thumb-click plus one finger down moves the cursor down through the text and selects.

If you start scrolling with two fingers and release one, the cursor reverses direction! This inconsistency just really feels wrong to me, but I guess you can get used to anything.

For me it's completely different with the same result: I imagine the scroll wheel is on the paper (screen), so my finger going down rolls the wheel and the bottom of the wheel pushes the paper (screen) under it upwards.

For whatever reason this persists to touchpads even though they would seem closer to a touchscreen.

I put a Hasu controller[1] in my Leopold F660C (Topre switches) and couldn't be happier. Though it voids the warranty, installation was very easy and it allows total control of the keymap via TMK. Looks like there are similar controllers by Hasu for HHKB[2]. If you can manage to order one I highly recommend it!

[1]: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=88720.0

[2]: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=71517.0

The Thinkpad I have is too old to have the BIOS feature to swap Fn and Ctrl. It has a Core 2 duo.

I love Macbook trackpads, even use a Magic Trackpad at my desk, and "natural" scrolling has never felt right for me.

I suspect my mental model is locked into the "drag scrollbar handle down" mode from the early mouse era rather than "drag page up" mode that is intuitive to people who's first computing device had a touchscreen.

> It makes sense on a trackpad too

No, it doesn't. Trackpads always worked fine until "they" reversed the motion. Now it's always a guessing game for the initial scroll. It's terrible, unintuitive, and doesn't make sense. "Natural" is unnatural.

On any non-apple system it has the "natural" scroll on the touchpad AND sane scrolling behavior.

What I did when I introduced my very non-technical partner to a mac was leave it at "natural" scrolling, show her the two-finger scroll gesture, let her try it out, then I turned off natural scrolling and asked her which she liked better. She picked the latter hands down. I knew there's a reason I'm with her :)

It's totally a matter of personal taste, both are objectively right depending on what one thinks the thing being manipulated is.

It's the ergonomics that I have an issue with.

On a mac that will pop up the emoji keyboard, allowing you to further express your feelings in ways that won't render on HN :)

I mean most of the time I want just the layout like it says on the keys. Isn't that representative of at least 90% of all users?

My LG OLED TV does have a headphone jack, and I send that through a mixer (combined with my CRT gaming setup's output, my record player, and my PC's output) to my stereo.

I don't like that aspect of emacs, but if you are a heavy-duty editor user it becomes difficult to arrange a consistent set of emacs shortcuts that aren't modal that don't conflict with anything else, because there's so many things you might want to do and so many pre-existing keyboard shortcuts that you can conflict with, not just in emacs but in your window manager. As a simple for-instance, I've got four or five keyboard shortcuts I added in the last year for dealing with the Claude windows in emacs that I've been using (the package defines a couple dozen, it's just about five I use a lot), and I didn't even try to figure out how to make them anything other than "C-c c $something" because it's hard to find somewhere they can go in any sort of pattern that makes any sense and doesn't conflict with anything. Fortunately most Unix window managers seem to leave the Windows key alone, but of course if I try to bring that to Windows it would fail miserably.

I did remap my heaviest hitters a long time ago to single strokes, though. Most notably, start macro, end macro, and replay macro all got coveted non-modal shortcuts.

for more info on thumb fatigue: https://getreuer.info/posts/keyboards/thumb-ergo/index.html

My issue was tendon overuse in my fingers, so low force switches & column splay worked for me

(splay is where the columns are not aligned, mapping to the fan out of the human hand, see TOTEM https://github.com/GEIGEIGEIST/TOTEM)

Jef Raskin called those "quasimodes" in The Humane Interface (2000) and was in favor of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Quasimod...

I wouldn't buy a laptop that requires the use of Fn for any key I commonly use. I don't particularly care about PrtScr, Break or ScrollLock. Can't remember the last time I used either of those. But Home/End/PgUp/PgDown are requirements.

They switched the Ctrl/Fn position a year or two ago so people like you would stop complaining. Of course this means that instead you have anybody who's used a thinkpad in the last 30 years complaining about the switch. It's a little better now because they made the keys the same size, so after you switch them in the BIOS you can physically switch the keycaps around.

Check out Scroll Reverser; it's a tiny, open source app that solves exactly this.

There are some other alternatives like BetterTouchTool if you want some other changes like gestures, but as far as this specific problem goes you can just `brew install scroll-reverser`, set up the settings you want and forget about it. Life is too short to deal with this nonsense which is clearly designed to sell the Magic Mouse.

https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

All mice supported scrolling. In the before times, you use the mouse to drag the scroll thumb, which was located on the scrollbar. And you'd drag it down to see information further "down" in the document.

So why doesn't the mouse pointer work that way on an Apple trackpad?

Surely if that's the case then when you move your finger to the upper left then the pointer should move to the bottom right. Because that's how it would work if it was a real object and you were pushing the pointer around with your finger. Why is scrolling a special case?

Honestly though, I wouldn't mind that much if Apple hadn't decided to call it "natural" scrolling, like you're weird if you prefer up for scroll up and down for scroll down. It's both smug and reeks of the same kinda of discriminatory attitude that made life hard for left handers.

Another recommendation is LinearMouse. It lets you fix pretty much every problem that MacOS inflicts on mouse users: pointer acceleration, scroll behavior, click/button behavior. This and Karabiner make the OS much more usable for me.

Try borrowing my laptop, it has the power button right next to Delete. You never know what exactly is going to be deleted!

My TV does have an audio jack. It's a cheap dumb TV. And almost all of my electronic devices have a 3.5 mm jack. You won't find it in top flagship models, but plenty of budget devices still have it.

So I was a Mac user for years and accepted and adapted to natural scrolling after it appeared as the default in 2011. When I switched back to a Windows laptop for work around 2018, I kept it on natural mode.

But then two years ago I got a desktop computer with an external mouse again and.... natural scrolling doesn't work for me on a physical wheel. With a trackpad, the metaphor is direct, that the page or document is being moved by the motion of your fingers; but with a wheel, I still want to pull it toward me to scroll down, because that feels like rolling the little wheel along the document, or turning it to advance the document beneath, like a printer finishing a page.

Maybe that's all silly, but for me it's natural scrolling on trackpads and conventional scrolling on mice with scrollwheels.

I don't think I've ever owned any headphones with a long enough cable to plug into my tv when I'm sitting at a comfortable viewing position

can you please expand on your thoughs on the thumb cluster?

(I have a dactly I kind of finished wiring, but didn't get around to programming it yet)

I have the same feeling and I use evil-mode in Emacs because of that. It's basically Vim inside of Emacs.

Whereas I cut my teeth on emacs in the early 90's, so modal is what felt awkward. I wouldn't dislike vim's modes so much if it just had one combination insert/append mode that worked like every other editor out there (including a couple other modal editors I've used), but even after adding various hacks to my vimrc to help unify the two modes, I still stumble over the behavior differences in other places.

I really like the composable shorthand of vim's command set though, even if the only one I have in muscle memory is <esc>:wq

> I don't particularly care about PrtScr, Break or ScrollLock

Glad for you. But the moment you need to hit Ctrl+Break...

Hold on, why isn't this a touchpad setting in the OS?

Of course they support scrolling with on screen controls. So has the keyboard. I said they’ve never made a mouse with “scroll wheel” which is a very specific device for physical input.

Every keyboard I used so far - and those were many, many, many - have the ctrl in the bottom left.

Lenovo is the only weird excemption I experienced.

So I believe people like me are the vast majority and you should maybe rather blame them, for introducing this weirdness in the first place.

The pointer represents your (pointer) finger. Single-finger motions affect the pointer. Scrolling motions affect a representation of the document. When I move my (real) finger up, my (real) finger moves up. When I put my (real) finger on a (real) document and move it up, the paper of the document moves up, causing new text from the bottom to appear in my field of view.

I must be the only person in the world who actually likes pointer acceleration. Karabiner is a must though: I use it solely for "remap capslock to hyper/esc", but that's still reason enough.

That's the sane handling of scrolling. macOS is weird for tying the scrolling direction of trackpads and mouse wheels in a single setting.

I don't know what the line is for "flagship" is, but my $2k 4k smart TV (which isn't connected to the internet) also has a 1/8" jack.

Hah, my work-issued laptop has that one as well. Power button should never be inline with normal keys, IMO.

> Maybe that's all silly

No it isn't.

Both examples match perfectly physically:

- Touchpad is like dragging the piece of paper directly.

- Scroll wheel is like having the paper on the other side of the wheel.

3.5mm to bluetooth adapters are also an option for wireless headphones if you don't mind the quality loss and other bluetooth annoyances.

I'm typing on a SoflePLUS2 right now. It's based on the Sofle v2 design, which is described as having a 5-key thumb arc per side. But I try to limit thumb use to the innermost 2 or 3 keys per side after experiencing fatigue. I use the outermost 2 or 3 as opposite-hand modifiers (ctrl, opt, cmd) and try to pull my whole arm in to use them with the same-column finger, instead of treating them as a thumb key that requires folding my thumb underneath my palm as I keep my hand in the home position.

It seems like many in the ergo keyboard crowd are trying to never move their hands from the home position, and I think that might be a mistake. Use a variety of muscles, avoid unnatural positions. More broadly, my understanding is that the research behind using a tented/splayed split keyboard is solid (better shoulder through wrist positioning) but there's nothing really but anecdotal experience supporting the idea that vastly reduced key counts (and associated need for complex layer setups) or column-staggered layouts reduce pain and plenty of confounders (going from unibody to split simultaneously, maybe switching from QWERTY at the same time too, reducing speed, often learning decent form for the first time, often regression to the mean because people switch when they are having problems).

My previous keyboard was a split with traditional row stagger (Goldtouch) that Google's ergo team advised me to try forever ago. I switched recently because I wasn't liking the mushy feel of the keys, that the two "space bars" weren't distinguishable, that it doesn't have an integrated pointing device, and that after such long use I'd worn down the homing indicator on the f/j keys and was struggling to orient my hands correctly. But row-staggered layout was fine IMHO. Made it easier to learn, to switch between it and other keyboards when I had to, and to hit keys further from the home position.

Here's something from Kinesis, who have been designing split ergonomic keyboards for a long time: https://kinesis-ergo.com/wp-content/uploads/Advantage360-ZMK... search for "If your thumbs are sensitive" and "Guidelines for using your thumbs". And note that while they have keys under z/x/c they do not describe them as thumb keys.

I tried evil-mode for awhile, but it had too many edge cases that behave differently so I went back /shrug

Thankfully, you can buy a cable extender for like $2, because it's a standard that has been around for 150 years.

Example: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=648

> I wouldn't dislike vim's modes so much if it just had one combination insert/append mode that worked like every other editor out there (including a couple other modal editors I've used), but even after adding various hacks to my vimrc to help unify the two modes, I still stumble over the behavior differences in other places.

To be fair, for most values of "every other editor out there," they came after vi (if not after vim), so it's not like vi was discarding existing wisdom.

Honestly, there are more "modern" editors with even more intuitive flows. Helix being one. I think the ideal editor for me would be something like a mix of Helix's shortcuts with structural regexp like in vis.

> Lenovo is the only weird excemption I experienced.

Apple has put the Fn key to the left of Ctrl since they added Fn to their laptops in 1998.

Or scrolling represents a viewpoint, such as a frame, or a finger pointing at the document. Then it's the other way round again. You can't just declare what the metaphor is, it's arbitrary.

Lenovo is the “weird exception” because thinkpads have always had the Fn key on the bottom left. Just like they still keep the track point.

I would presume most people buying a thinkpad don’t want to buy “the vast majority” of laptops.

FYI you can remap capslock in the built-in MacOS keyboard settings. Click Keyboard Shortcuts and then go to Modifier Keys.

I have my instance set up to enable/disable evil via a keybinding. That way, the edge cases can be handled smoothly. There is also a way to configure evil so that emacs keybindings work while in Insert mode, but not in Normal or Visual mode, if that matters at all.

For sure, I'm saying that vi stuck with its design rather than follow the trend of other modal editors that converged on one insert mode, and so did its follow-ups like vim.

I just tried out helix and I'm really liking the features like its single insert mode. Still taking some getting used to, since it's selection-first, not command-first, so `dd` just deletes two chars and not the line. And shift-V doesn't select lines... grr.

Just be aware of your surroundings if you do this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=APJhnjaHql0

Macbook M3 ... same. Not such a weird exception these days.

> thinkpads have always had the Fn key on the bottom left

It’s good that after 30 years they’ve realised their error and have finally fixed it. On Windows and Linux, Ctrl is the most-used-modifier-key and bottom-left is the most-easy-to-find-key-position. Putting the most used key in the easiest-to-find position shouldn’t be a hard decision to make.

No. I bought it especially, because it has a replacable battery, which is not a factor for the vast majority I believe.

If that key would not have been switchable I would have returned it, though ..

But seriously. Who would want that excemption, unless they have already been trained in the non standard way?

Ctrl key I have to use very often. Bottom left is easy to find, even blind.

But the fn Key? Only needed at very rare occasions, so why waste the special ergonomic place for it?

It's just a hardwired list of targets, and doesn't support the fun combination of bucky bits that I remap capslock to (in lieu of an actual hyper key, which macOS has no concept of). Also, when I tap capslock as opposed to holding it, it sends an ESC, which I'm pretty sure I would need Karabiner for.

Actually, there are a number of full-screen editors that pre-dated vi. They were for mainframe operating systems, or were confined to some university or other, or were commercial products for something like CP/M made by some tiny company somewhere, and are largely forgotten; with the last magtapes or floppy discs that had copies of them long since thrown away. Unix and vi, and what escaped UCB, got remembered. But there was other stuff around.

Certainly! I was intentionally hedging my bets with 'most' in "for most values of 'every other editor out there.'" I'd still argue that, for very large values of 'most,' most editors in widespread use today came after vi.