Some of the prices on caps and cases were insane. Then what happens is you get this status on particular makers or products that only had very limited runs and were sold at very high prices and the prices just keep going up.

In the end I settled on a nice mass produced 60% board that suited me, got a relatively cheap case and some caps to taste, sold the other boards and left it at that.

It was fun for a while, but it's a deep rabbit hole and quite expensive. I also noticed that for many (including myself to some degree) it turns into a 'collect and show off' endeavour, where your status in the community is basically tied to how much money you've spent. And that just wasn't the game I wanted to play any more.

I don't understand this trend for less and less keys. I get that it can be nice to have more room on the desktop but why would you give up the arrow- and F-keys. They are so useful and the space benefit without them is marginal.

Want a numpad? Switch to a different layout on the fly and have a numpad where you want it. Arrow keys? F-Keys? Why not have those on home row with another layout!

It can get gimmicky, but the impetus for it is that less overall finger/wrist movement == more ergonomic but I'm not fully convinced. Instead, I just prefer everything I can get on home row.

I don't want a numpad because getting my mouse closer to the center of my desk really helps with RSI for me. There weren't many options left at that point, especially since I wanted a UK layout and no unstandard key sizes (limits your options with keycaps).

But yeah, if I could get something that looked as nice and had F+arrow keys I'd probably go for it.

Fwiw I got used to the chords you need to access those pretty fast.

Same. I bought a full-sized keyboard with numpad, but I felt it put the mouse too far off to the right. I much prefer the mouse to rest couple of inches from the enter key.

I think my next one will have it on the left side.

Just an overview: http://xahlee.info/kbd/programable_keypads.html

I think the only disadvantage is it's a separate thing, so you have two things to push away from you if you don't want to use the keyboard.

Same here. I went with a smaller keyboard for ergonomics. Also, I never use F-keys and rarely use the arrow keys, and there are some "60%" layouts (The [Mass]Drop ALT) that still have the arrow keys. I don't care for the RGB and other blingy crap on these, since I really don't look at the keyboard much anyway.

The purpose of the gaps is orientation: you can feel that you are going to press F4, because there's a gap below and to the right of it.

Funnily most laptop keyboards get away with no spaces between any keys even when there might be space. Granted, there are more considerations there, but I think convention has a little to do with it too.

Thumb modifiers are also bad for me, as my thumb joints seem particularly sensitive to RSI/arthrosis. One size doesn’t fit all in ergonomics.

I wonder how many of the mouse-haters have a numpad. I used to be one of them until I got rid of it.

But you should've seen the incredulous look I got when I gave a USB number pad for Christmas to a left handed accountant.

For me - There's another layout named "ABC - Extended", which reverses the two - so £ is on alt-3, but # is back where it belongs. It has a very different compose set behind the alt modifier though, so might be jarring if you frequently use them.

The British PC keyboard layout has # as a first-level key (next to Enter), and some Windows + Mac users manage to set the Mac to use this layout.

I'm glad it's working out for you, and I'll certainly sneer a little bit less at them in the future, but just using my anecdotal experience, a lot of RSIs make chording keys difficult, and most people who use small form factor keyboards say they do so because it makes their desk less cluttered. Maybe it's not just a fashion item... But for a certain segment, it certainly is.

I got a short keyboard (no number pad) for the ergonomics. I've been battling ergonomics pains (mainly shoulder). After reading many articles one mentioned getting a shorter keyboard so you don't have to move your hand as far to transition from keyboard to mouse. I gave it a try and it does help. I do miss the number pad though!

One; the "audiophile" mindset has afflicted mechanical keyboards -- most people are buying keyboards for the purpose of showing off their keyboards, rather than to enhance their ability to interact with computers. Actual functionality is kind of an afterthought, and style is very important to people.

Two; it's easy enough to make your own keyboard out of commodity parts that there might not be any market for unusual designs. What is available in bulk is what is profitable to manufacture in bulk, and that's what you see advertised in your "social media marketing bs". But, it's easy to make your own and opt-out of all of that.

I wanted a split keyboard with the two halves a certain distance apart, thumb keys that were the exact size of my thumbs, and a numberpad in the middle. Shockingly, no such thing has ever been manufactured in bulk! So I drew one in CAD, printed it out, popped in the keyswitches, hand-wired the rows and columns, connected it to a microcontroller, downloaded commodity firmware to the microcontroller, and I had the exact keyboard I had always wanted. (Turns out: I hated it! But... you don't know until you try.)

I guess what I'm saying is that you should skip the BS and make your own.

in fairness, you can buy separate numpads with the added bonus of being able to put it where you want. That being said, yes. the crazy 60%, etc keyboards are a bit much.

But I find it very strange that some of the most popular mechanical keyboards are much less ergonomic than a cheap Dell keyboard -- especially the Planck Keyboard, and anything with a fixed 1970s "wedge" shape.

In an effort to show there are some reasonable options, I made (strongly deriving from an earlier website on GitHub) and continue to maintain a gallery of ergonomic mechanical keyboards: https://aposymbiont.github.io/split-keyboards/

Don't get me wrong, custom keyboards are great and it's good to see innovation, but some builds aren't that reasonable in terms of investment for an input device.