this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
12 points (100.0% liked)

Mechanical Keyboards

135 readers
57 users here now

A community for news, discussion, and showing off your mechanical keyboards

founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS
Vacant
12
Why do so many split keyboards not have "F" keys? (self.mechanical_keyboards)
submitted 11 hours ago by 0101100101 to c/mechanical_keyboards
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Undoubtedly, programmers are a major user of keyboards, and IDE developers love function keys for esoteric shortcuts for debugging, moving around, and running code. So why do so many split keyboards not actually have the function keys.

I think makers are missing out a huge audience.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Probably because layering and chording easily let you access the F-keys while not having them take up so much space.

[–] 0101100101 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

But some f key shorcuts already need ctrl + alt/shift pressing so you don't have many options for switching to a different layer.

[–] tyler 0 points 7 hours ago

My shift and layer switch are both under my thumb so I can hit cmd+ opt/ctrl + shift + layer shift and an F key all at once with only 4 fingers.