The Worst Computer Keyboard Ever!

In these days we are all forced to stay at home, due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Having to do *smart-working** and work from home, I decided to change my 105 keys keyboard with a smaller one, in order to save some space on my desk and have a more comfortable workstation layout.

And so, I ordered online a compact keyboard, an 85 one.

Bad idea!
I haven’t considered enough some basic things I was so used that were, to me, for free.

Angle Brackets

The keyboard does not have the usual left-positioned angle brackets key; the brackets are splitted across the Z (>) and X (<) keys. This means that I have to hit the Fn key and the letter to get the bracket. Moreover, the brackets are in an uncommon and uncomfortable order: the first key you are going to hit is the closing bracket, not the opening one! Some programs and applications that require complex shortcuts like meta-> cannot be used because you would have to press meta-Fn-z that the keyboard does not see to honor.

Enter Key

The ENTER key is simply too small and, most notably, occupies only one row on the keyboard instead of a couple of rows as in the most common layouts. This means that, most of times, you are not going to hit the right key but rather the key immediatly on the upper row, that is §.

CTRL and Meta

The CTRL and meta keys have the same size, and this is counter-intuitive. Moreover, the presence of an Fn key between them makes harder to hit CTRL and meta at the same time because my fingers don’t count the extra key in the middle.

Paginator Keys

The paginator keys (e.g., PgUp) are overlapped with the arrow keys. This makes particularly hard to move across the text because you need to hold Fn to paginate. Moreover, using paginator keys in combination with other keys, like SHIFT-End does not seem to be honored since the keyboard is not allowing you to press the whole sequence SHIFT-Fn-RightArrow.

Lag

The keyboard had a stupid lag when used in intesinve writing mode. The final effect is that many letters are mangled and the words become incomplete. This is more true as the computer is doing any task, so I suspect the wireless receiver is somehow overcharging the CPU.
*The CapsLock key was ridiculous: it immediatly activate but requires up to four seconds to deactivate.

Conclusions

As trivial as it could seem, a keyboard has to be chosen carefully, especially if it needs to improve your productivity.

And in the case you are wondering which brand of keyboard it was, I will not discuss it here, but you can surely guess from my online reviews!

The article The Worst Computer Keyboard Ever! has been posted by Luca Ferrari on April 18, 2020