Does anyone here use a numpad? What for? I made my own macropad[1] but I struggle to find a use, the only thing I use it for is CAD shortcut keys. Any ideas are welcome!

[1] https://immich.home.stavros.io/share/GE_noaUx1_cayK9WDVvzutr...

I don't use a numpad, but a friend of mine swears by them for playing roguelikes. It makes it much easier to move diagonally in a single turn.

If you play any games with keyboard and mouse, you could bind some letters/numbers from the right half of the keyboard and then place the macropad on the left so you don't have to take your hand off the mouse to hit anything.

For another idea, you could bind pgup/pgdn or scroll wheel up and down for scrolling webpages, IRC backlog, etc.

> Does anyone here use a numpad?

Yes.

> What for?

Inputting numbers.

The number row is too wide and too offset on a staggered keyboard to really work for me. I'd be interested in trying a full-width ortholinear keyboard, but can't find any.

I've personally replaced keymacros by things like Alfred's workflows (or Raycast's): aka a universal command palette.

It's usually very fast to type "cmd-space", and then type 3-4 letters to find the macro I want.

I have a number of AutoHotKey/Hammerspoon numpad shortcuts for arranging windows.

In Visual Studio, on the suggestion of a colleague at my first job, I use Numpad + for copy, Numpad - for cut, and Numpad * for paste. (I've never managed to train my hand eye coordination to use these in any other program. Which is a bit of a shame, because they're actually pretty useful. Whichever side you mouse on, you can find some way of hitting them without much effort.)

The numpad also comes in handy sometimes for typing numbers.

I have a similar sized macropad that I use extensively with AutoHotKey for application-specific shortcuts like clicking on buttons that don't have a keyboard shortcut, or scrolling two panes of a window simultaneously. All things that I could bind a key combo to, but I like having a dedicated button for.

As a 90s phone user where you text on one it feel like a fast way to type a credit card number or similar. Pretty rare use case with modern keychains and password managers though.

I do when I'm using a keyboard that has one, for numeric input, but I don't do this often enough to prefer it to the smaller form factor of a tenkeyless keyboard.

My usual layout, left to right, is Magic Trackpad, tenkeyless keyboard, mouse on mousepad cut down to roughly the size of a Magic Trackpad (with a larger mousepad on hand for gaming and other precision applications).

Quite a bit - I have a bunch of custom shortcuts for musical notation (adding dynamics, expression, etc.) for rapidly entering music into my notation software.

Yep, trying to type a long number on the top row is super tedious to me. I just use a layer under my right hand for 10-key.