I’m surprised by the love here for the number pad! I saw mainly benefits for getting a 60 or 65% when I was considering a keyboard kit:

• More space for moving my mouse to the left. I play FPS games with a pretty low sensitivity, and I used to flick my thumb into my keyboard.
• More portable. My keyboard can connect with Bluetooth or usb-c so it’s nice to be able to use with a tablet
• Less switches to lube and install when I assembled it
• No redundant keys, though I had to learn traditionally typing numbers. But now I don’t have to move my hand position to type them.

I do prefer vim for text editing, so I have less use for some of the special keys. But they’re still nice to have for shortcuts or keybinds.

I was a cashier, then a bookkeeper during the time when both heavily used the "10-key" and got really fast at touch typing numbers. Not as fast now, but I would be absolutely lost without it for spreadsheets, calculations, etc. I wouldn't even consider a keyboard without one!

96 and 1800 are where it is at. Via is a bonus

I have a split 40% because I type for a living and normie keyboards destroy my wrists.

i love my 60% keyboard. i rebound the caps lock key to be a modifier key that swaps the functions of several keys on the keyboard. i basically have two keyboards stacked on top of each other that i can switch between at will. e.g., when caps lock is held: the number keys turn into Fn keys, WASD turns into the arrow keys, and N, M, < turn into the volume down, mute, and volume up keys, respectively.

i also changed the rgb colors on the keyboard so this is all color coded in case i forget.

Ergodox EZ checking in...

Imagine the market being saturated with all kinds of keyboards in various form factors and layouts and someone holding you accountable for what you're using.

I used to think I can't do without an F-row. Nowadays I use a bunch of 60-ish boards (a Boardwalk, a Lily58, an Elora) and it's all fine. Even back when I was using a 75%, I was used to have e.g. the arrows on IJKL on a layer (of course it doesn't work well for games, but for things like text editing I'd argue it's even better than dedicated keys). In general I'd suggest to everyone to challenge themselves a little bit with things that don't seem good at first but might end up being useful in the long run.

I dropped my full sized keychron a while back and the pcb got screwed up at the usb c port, so I'm stuck on a 60%. It's nice to have the extra desk space, but I'd be completely lost if I didn't have a macropad. Even still, it's kind of a pain in the ass sometimes. Eventually I'll be not-broke enough to justify getting a new pcb, hopefully, but I'm not even sure how to order just a pcb from them. Giant pain in the ass.

I do like my little Newman board, though. It has some nice linears that I lubed up and I've got a tape mod on it. I miss qmk but it's better than a membrane at least.

Originally I picked it up to use with my phone so I could get work done on the road without slowing my typing speed to a crawl and grappling with autocorrect. Made a decent backup!