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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what you are doing of course.

Cannot speak to the fashion side of it but my original motivator to move to a keypad less was to reduce the distance of the mouse to my typing space. I do not do any type of data entry and rarely type numbers with enough frequency to require it.

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I found a Microsoft Sidewinder keyboard that let you modularly unhook the Num Pad and move it to the left as an option, and having a left side Num Pad has been a wonder for gaming, not just the closer distance between the home row and the mouse, but also a few games I have taken some small advantage from the closer distance for the left hand from "WASD position" to the Num Pad for commands/macros or even the naturalness in games that support it of using the "WASD hand" for Num Pad arrows. I'm now surprised left hand Num Pad isn't more common in keyboard form factors. Modular is particularly handy because there are still mouse-less data entry scenarios where it is nice to have it on right hand because left is busy with Tab and other accelerator keys.

Same for me. The shorter distance seems to put substantially less strain on my wrists and shoulder. Can’t imagine sitting in front of a tenkey for hours at a time now.

While I do miss the number pads it was leading me to bad posture and messing up my back. I like how some keyboards have detached numberpad but they are rare.

Southpaw keyboards (with lefthand numpads) also exist, but they're even more rare.

Yeah I put a wireless numpad to the left of the keyboard when I need it - mainly just for Blender and Excel.

I've used a couple different "1800 compact"-ish keyboards for more than a decade now, where you use NumLock to toggle the right-hand side keys between a numpad and arrow keys + Del/Ins/Home/etc. It gives you most of the keypadless benefit.

First one I had was a CoolerMaster Storm Quickfire TK, now I'm on a Keychron K4V2. I actually liked the TK better, but it's completely worn out and I couldn't seem to find a similar layout on a new keyboard.

I moved the mouse to the left.

Went through a lot, trackballs, 2 mice, narrow keyboards, but the left hand mouse was the one that fixed the biomechanical issues, and they haven't returned in 20+ years.

I type in a 2FA code a few times a day and that's enough to justify it for me. Really hate typing in numbers without one

Some of the fancier ones will have layers where you can turn part of they keyboard directly into a number pad if you're mostly typing just numbers. Best of both worlds.

is a separate numpad an option?

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