Ask Lemmy

Just buy this

When I started my current job, I thought I was getting a repetitive stress injury from the hundreds of copy pastes I was making daily. Eventually I got used to it, but my hand still hurts occasionally.

I am 100% behind the idea of dedicated buttons!

I think that everyone who really wants that will spend a half an hour learning how to remap keys.

At some point, the populace felt keyboard shortcuts were enough and they have everything else they need on a keyboard. It's the standard, other keyboard designs didn't really quite take off, and most people can barely use a full-sized keyboard anyway.

Some people prefer smaller keyboards, and are willing (and wanting) to have more shortcuts and function layers for ergonomic and desk space reasons.

(If you use a 40% or smaller keyboard, you're weird, and I love/hate you.)

Some other people use so many shortcuts that it becomes so infeasible to remember or press them all, so they get macro pads, or even entire additional keyboards to function as macro pads.

One of my computers has a clipboard key that's for pasting.

Except I'm totally used to ctrl-C ctrl-V, so I never use it.

Back in the day there were 12 more keys that could be bound to that but they decided to get rid of them.

Logitech G910 has a bunch of extra keys that you can create macros for and on mine I've got three of them set just for that

I can see the benefit, although personally I'm too attuned to ctrl+c,v,z,x

A key I'd really like to see on computer keyboards is a shift key that behaves the same as on a phone, toggling between lowercase, Title Case, and UPPERCASE.

It'd be so useful to be able to select text you've already typed and change the format. Phones have done it for years, why not computers? Could be a much better use for the Caps Lock key.

I'm pretty happy working as a developer where I can choose my own editor. (Neo)Vim, Kakoune, now Helix, they all just have one single key used for copying (/"yanking") text to a register: y, and it's bloody fast. I can't even use VS Code without a Vim or Helix or Kakoune emulator extension. But of course I prefer to use the faster, pure terminal applications.

To be honest I'm not really that great with Vim actions anymore. Even if I was using it for about a decade. The Kakoune and Helix model just made too much sense.

Mm, I wouldn't hate it. It could take the place of the scroll lock and pause break buttons on my keyboard, two keys i've literally never used.

I used to have a keyboard with dedicated copy and paste keys. Never used them.

If you have a QMK compatible keyboard you can do that.