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Comment by janwillemb | Hacker News Reader

None of these keyboards have a numeric keypad; these are for fancy design and not for heavy use.

Many developers get along just fine with no numpad. We're not accountants.

Dev myself. Can’t live without a numpad.

Also dev here. I miss the numpad maybe once a quarter but better ergonomics and posture make it worth it. Without a numpad I can keep the letter part of the keyboard right in front of me instead of slightly shifted to the left.

My keyboard is also programmable so CapsLock+WASD are my arrow keys and once you have that down, you will never want to go back.

Likewise, ortholinear programmable keyboard. Holding down one of the left hand home-row keys turns a numpad-sized chunk of keys under the right hand into a numpad.

One does (it's a southpaw, numeric keypad on the left). A few are TKL (full size keyboard without the numpad).

Actually, as a programmer, I pretty much never use the numeric keypad. But when I start seeing smaller layouts with no arrow keys, Fn keys, or even number keys, I tend to agree: there's a definite trade off between function and aesthetics. The beauty of custom keyboards is people get to decide those trade-off's themselves.

As a dev I also have very little use for a numpad. Unless it’s a the weekend and I’m messing around in Blender, it along with the traditional home/end cluster and arrows are just a bunch of dead space pushing my mouse way too far the right. I much prefer the numpad being it’s own separate thing that can be moved around, but a southpaw setup would be ok too.

The worst thing is when laptops come with numpads, pushing the trackpad off to the left and making it impossible to center my arms while typing. Drives me crazy.

I type all day long and have no need for a numeric keypad. I prefer having more real estate on my desk rather than occupy space with no purpose.

The only thing I've ever used a numpad for in my life is Blender (3D modeling) which has some core shortcuts mapped to the numpad. Unfortunately that means these 60% keyboards wouldn't really work for me, but I've never ever used the numpad for programming.

I've had a normal keyboard for ages and I've never used the numpad. And I can assure you I use my keyboard very heavily.

However I've lately started to transition to ergonomical keyboards where I have the numpad under the fingertips but on a separate layer.

How do you reconcile "heavy use" and straying from home row? Any serious who actually engages their keyboard in heavy use would be just as productive with a 60% keyboard, as they wouldn't move their hands from home row position to use the numpad or the arrow keys or anything. That's why for example Emacs uses Ctrl+{f,b,n,p} for navigation instead of the arrow keys.

Yes, I had to use a keyboard with a non-IBM layout (for lack of a better description) for a while at work, it’s absolutely maddening the location where some of the keys are. Impossible to get used to when you’re using a lot of shortcuts in eg editors.

I much prefer these. The numpad widens the keyboard unnecessarily.

I use it for accounting. You can't type numbers without looking at your keyboard if there is no keypad.

Not necessarily - I could say the same about regular keyboards not supporting layers/chords...

I use layer 2 for that, under the right hand.

With an ortholinear the muscle memory transfers completely.

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