I don’t need to look at the most common keys or the letters; but some of the weirder ones I don’t use often, I might have to actually look at the board for. Having them backlit helps see when it’s dark. 🤷🏻♂️
I’ve had this ErgoDox for, like, 6 years. It has underlights, but no backlights, but also no home row keys. The entire time I’ve owned it, in the dark I’ve struggled to find the home row, often taking seconds to find my finger placement by feeling the edges of the keyspace. It’s been a constant source of irritation, but it never occurred to me to just buy some home row caps.
Anyway, I was tidying up to office the other day, and found a little packet that came with the keyboard containing home row caps. FML, but with a silver lining, right?
In the process of swapping out those two caps, I completely broke the J switch. So now I’m (temporarily) using a Kinesis Gaming keyboard and learning an object lesson about how utterly miserable row stagger is.
My point is that backlighting would probably have saved me a lot of grief; not as much as home row keys, but still better than nothing.
Many laptops are made with the US ANSI layout and other layouts like UK ISO are either shoehorned in at the final design stage or relegated to shuffling symbols around and requiring both Fn+Shift to type a character that used to have its own damn key. I’m not salty.
My samsung laptop has no way to change the backlight from Linux so it stays off. If only there were a way to this in a standardised way (acpi) samsung?
I look at my keys when I type and I’m not ashamed of that. I always have, since Oregon trails on 5.25 floppy in the early 90s.
I could probably train myself out of it, and I can type whole sentences without looking, but only with the 6 fingers I normally use, rather than the full 8 most people use, and it’s a fucking chore. Frankly, it seems like a massive waste of mental resources to learn to type without looking, and I actively resisted learning it in typing classes in middle/highschool. I’m not doing data entry, so whatever I’m writing is a creative process, and that benefits from sight. I get eyes on what I’m doing while I’m doing it, and again when I check it over. It worked out very well for me when I started typing in Cyrillic, I just added transparent stickers. Homework was a breeze; I was looking anyway! :)
Yes I fucking want backlit keys. Even if just for when I’m laying in bed at a weird angle and can’t see the key layout, or sitting in a dark room. I would want them in a drunken stupor, too, even tho I use my phone for that browsing, which is backlit by default.
In summary, backlit keys are the shit. I spent a gob of money on a backlit, rechargeable, wireless keyboard, and I regret nothing.
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