Most Mechanical Keyboard Fans Prefer Smaller Keyboards, But I Go The Other Direction
Keyboard enthusiasts, and mainly mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, tend to prefer smaller keyboards, and particularly 65% keyboards. The stated reason is that they don’t need the keys, or they prefer to have more space for the mouse, or they like things to be minimalistic. In my case, I prefer 100% over all of them, for the totally opposite reason. I do use these keys, and I am not a huge mouse user. I will talk about all these reasons in detail below.
Seeing there are quite many 100%, which I own several of, I know I am not alone. If there wasn’t demand for them, there wouldn’t be many for me to buy in the first place.
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Yes, I Use All These Keys
As I just said, the main argument for preferring smaller keyboards is that they don’t use the keys. I personally use most of the function keys as global hotkeys to do various things. For example, I use the F4 key to move windows between my different screens. F5 to refresh my browser, even when it is not in focus. I also had the pause key activate my browser. Without these extra keys, I won’t be able to have dedicated keys for these things. The same goes for the numpad, which I rarely if ever use to enter numbers. They are all hotkeys I can do stuff with. This makes my life much easier.
Sure, you can do that on a smaller keyboard with layers, but having dedicated keys for certain tasks makes it easier to do things with one hand, or even one finger, something layers won’t allow you to do.
Space For The Mouse? Don’t Exactly Need That
One of the main advantages of smaller keyboards is how they give you more space to move the mouse. This can be great for playing FPS games. In my case, I don’t need much space for the mouse. I also do a lot of my stuff using the keyboard itself. So this was never an issue for me.
Sometimes, A TKL With A Separate Numpad Is An Awesome Solution
While I certainly don’t need a space for the mouse, I totally admit that having the mouse closer to my right hand is a convenience. I do own TKL keyboards, so I have experienced that firsthand. Since the numpad truly makes the mouse a bit further to reach. One solution was to use a left-handed keyboard. Where the numpad is on the left of the keyboard instead of the right:-
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There is one problem with this approach. It will greatly limit the number of keyboards I can use. So a good solution was to use a separate numpad & place it to the left of the keyboard. That way, I get to have all the keys I want while having the numpad to the left of the keyboard. I even came up with a solution to attach both to form a larger keyboard.
And Finally
People tend to get surprised about my preference when I talk about keyboards with fellow enthusiasts. They tend to acknowledge my use case after I tell them about how I use the different keys. That’s not to say my way of doing things is the only good one, but it’s one worth considering.
More often than not, it feels like we 100% enthusiastic are a minority, but we are still hanging there, in the sea of 65% keyboards & smaller (that got dramatic really fast).
I hope you found this article useful, and I will see you in another Tech Fairy article. Check out the mobile apps I developed, which I hope you find useful & interesting.