I’ve been thinking about this a little bit recently. I wanted to buy a RAMA m60-a for my daily driver on my home desk, but the fact that the control isn’t where it used to be kinda scared me off, as I use ctrl often for crouching in games primarily. (see below)
Hard to say. We’re all different in how we learn, adapt. I change back and forth from HHKB to ANSI quite often. Usually takes me about an hour to fully readjust. But then again, I change my keyboard almost every day.
In Games where I have the same Keybinds for years it’s a bit frustrating at first learning new Keybinds because you will very often miss press. But after few days I always get the hang off and set it down to my mind-muscle memory.
Bugha, one of the best fortnite players out there, even changed his keybinds after years uf using the same ones.
For me it would be more of a problem losing some keys in games with a lot of keybinds. That’s why i ordered the M65-B.
Do either of you guys miss your arrow keys? I feel like I use them less and less on my 65% but I’m a little scared of giving them up.
It does take a while to get used to the HHKB arrow cluster on [ ; ’ / keys, but I don’t miss them after getting used to it. The only time I switch to a 65% or TKL with arrow is if I’m doing a lot of work that requires me to hold down other keys in addition to the arrow. For instance, selecting multi-line code or shift+nudging things in illustrator.
I’ll be handwiring something along the lines of an HHKB clone with an extra row of macros on the left and a couple keys moved around (backspace in num row, |\ on r3, etc.) and I thought about binding arrows to fn+HJKL because I’ve heard that’s common. The standard HHKB placement does sound awful though
The standard placement is very natural if you use your pinky finger on the function key next to the right shift. It makes it possible to access the arrow cluster and the home block (on K L , . ) with only one hand
I put an extra layer on mine occasionally, so that I can also use the control/caps position as a function key for arrows on IJKL, but I find myself needing it less as I get used to the standard option.
For gaming I don’t miss them because I neved used arrow keys in games.
For browsing and text writing I miss them sometimes though. Of course you can set the arrow keys to like W-A-D with FN or something like that.
Only thing I ever miss the arrow keys for is flash games. Then I just whip out the K-Type and get Box Jade’d to death.
Yeah I’m not too worried. The only thing I primarily use arrows for is emotes in games like Destiny 2 and paging through things.
I use alt for crouching in games. The problem with this is that you need to change tab’s keybind as well, otherwise you will accidentally alt tab out of the game.
I recommend against using the standard ctrl position in videogames, its too far under your palm. Using ctrl is a surefire way to start developing RSI wrist problems.
Food for though: As a person, who feels their pinky is too short to reach tab, with out moving their hand, I’m constantly thinking about switching from wasd to esdf or maybe even rdfg, but having to remap the controls in every game, has held me back from trying.
The control key has been the deal breaker for me. I switched from staggered to ortho a couple of years ago and everything is roughly in the same position, and even that took quite a while to get used to before it was totally natural. I made a Boardwalk KB which is an ortho that fits in a normal 60% case, and tried the CTRL where Caps Lock normally is and even after weeks it was still an absolute mess for me. I ended up switching cases so I could put ctrl back where it was and have loved it ever since. My opinion, HHKB layout is really tough for gaming, especially FPS
oo, funny I was just having this conversation somewhere on reddit or keebtalk. I recently got an hhkb and I play a lot of CS:GO. Whenever I tried crouch-jumping I would mess up and my pinky would end up slamming into the plastic case 
. I eventually stopped doing crouch jumps to get onto cat on Dust II lol
Make a layer for it! If your keeb is programmable, just make a toggleable gayming layer and then you’ll be able to do it without having to deal with any sort of fiddly rebinding.
it took me a while to adapt to HHKB’s Control for normal daily use; and another while for gaming use.
but after getting used to it, I feel the normal Control position is too far, my hand need to move too much to reach it.
I recommend you to switch to HHKB’s Control, it’s better for your hand and also… the Capslock is useless anyways.
about the HHKB’s backspace, maybe it’s only slightly better than the normal Backspace.
I cannot get used to HHKB’s arrows, right now I use Fn + WASD for arrows.
You use your thumb for alt then?
On topic:
I do use caps as fn for wasd arrows and pgup/pgdown and backspace.
And that is so good that i don’t want to give it up.
also i can always keep my left hand there while my right hand sometimes wanders to my trackball.
I even tryed to use caps + zxcv as a replacement for ctrl + zxcv
And binding superkeys as ctrl feels awkward too.
Ooo… My current keyboard’s aren’t that customize able, but the Tex Shinobi might be able to to do it… now I think that just added a +5 to my anticipation…
Yeah, I use my thumb for alt. My thumb essentially controls the vertical axis in games.
Any ergonomic layouts because I enjoy switching keyboards multiple times a day and having an unfamiliar layout in the mix would throw me off.
