Computer Cheap Buy

This is by no means a fixed blueprint and suggestions are welcome in the comments; I’m just throwing out ideas which could go into an optional keyboard for powerusers. For example, users who:
- want quicker and less awkward access to the arrow keys
- want quicker and less awkward access to the pgup/pgdn/home/end keys
- want an extra modifier if they’re crazy
- want easier access to the mouseclick buttons on laptops
- and overall want less movement of the hands.

1)
One has space for an extra row of buttons below the keyboard.

At least 3 of these buttons should be the mouse buttons for easy access (as opposed to having them below the trackpad where they’re hard to reach when typing… have people tried the rubbery mouse-stub? some people couldn’t live without it while others dislike it).

2)
The Fn button should have the following bindings:
j - left
k - down
l - right
i - up
u - home
o - end
p - pgup
; - pgdn
something - delete

This prevents one from needing to move one’s hand back and forth between the keyboard and arrow/home/pgup keys all the time.

To appease gamers and such who often use a trackpad, the trackpad could be emulated with Fn2 button which the left thumb can hit. (Alternatively, make the Fn key multimodal like the Toshiba m200… it’s a bit hard for users to grasp though so I wouldn’t recommend it.)

The Fn keys should be reachable easily with either of one’s thumbs (see below). Areas which are unreachable (for some but by no means all typists) include:
- bad: the key to the right of the key on the bottom-left corder (a good place for the Win key which, while used often, is often not used in combination with other modifier keys and hence a good candidate to keep there)
- bad: anything right of the spacebar and also more than half a keywidth right of comma/lessThan key.

3)
I’m not so sure about this one, so a poll should be done to see how many people find the idea interesting.

Poll: “Do you think the spacebar on keyboards is too big? Do you often hit the spacebar with more than one thumb? Would you rather sacrifice some of the room on your spacebar for useful keys?”

If people answer “yes, no, and yes” and similar, then consider this:

Some typists never use their left thumb. This means that there could be up to 5 extra keys in the spacebar area! (ctrl, fn, win, alt, super, [whatever Dell wants], and two mini- spacebars (right below v-b and m-n) to appease both left- and right-handed people.

It is unlikely that this idea is for more than a few people… but perhaps worth investigation. If Dell does implement it, it should offer various optional keyboard layouts for their laptops, but never force the user to have it.

caveat: One may need to do lots of usability testing.
caveat2: Please under no conditions make the functions hardware-only; please make them generate keysyms.

Source: ninjagecko