It’s about hand movement, not desk space.

The “missing” keys are on additional layers reached via a modifier key, or by overloading keys on tap/hold, or by increasingly esoteric methods the smaller the board gets: chording, tap dance, etc. They’re typically no less accessible than capital letters, while allowing you to keep your fingers on the home row.

For me, the additional keys on my larger keyboards rarely prove useful in practice. I end up mostly using the same subset available on the 60% I’m typing on now – it’s quicker and more comfortable than reaching over to the dedicated key.

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adornKey 2 days ago | parent [-]

On the other hand there is spatial memory. Overloading things has some downsides - it adds more possibilities for errors - and makes muscle memory complicated.

In a lot of software those extra function keys are well used, easily go into muscle memory and help to safe a lot of time.

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alpaca128 a day ago | parent [-]

I actually make fewer errors and in some cases reach higher speeds when typing a lot of special symbols as everything is reachable without moving my hands and I arranged all special symbols in a way that makes sense to me. Muscle memory works perfectly fine, with the difference that I don't need to make blind error prone hand movements across the keyboard to use arrow keys etc.

	▲	adornKey 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That sounds promising. Training muscle memory for a custom arrangement of keys is something I'm not (yet) brave enough to do. Did you arrange everything yourself? Normal Arrow-Keys on a layer are good. But I need Arrow-Keys usually in combination with Shift and Ctrl. (move to start, end, next instance, declaration, implementation, Select something). This is already overloaded a lot, so I'm not sure, how well this works with a layer. The thing that's missing for me most are those function keys. I need them a lot - sometimes overloaded in combination with Shift and Ctrl. Those actions are usually something that should be out of reach from normal typing (Terminate something, start a Compiler, mess with Breakpoints, ...). Those small keyboards never include function keys. But I think I could just build something for that.. Custom button-Panels with a few keys are quite easy to make.