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Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

Site is down, but judging by the photos on Flickr, there were some really weird and unusable (?) keyboards on display.

Are these considered art or experiments? Or do people have actual use for things like 20-key layouts?

Some people just like tiny keyboards. Moreover, keyboards are quite fun to build and typing on a keyboard you built yourself is satisfying : you have so much choice regarding components.

I think that very tiny boards are not really used by their owners (see the Gherkin board for example), but they still are a lot of fun to build. Just don't take it too seriously.

The OLKB Planck seems to be a nice tradeoff between usability and space efficiency.

I think you're right about English tiny keyboards, but Japanese ones seem more potentially useful to input kana.

Some very small layouts can in fact be used, and quite effectively. I have a co worker who types using stenography (and develops with it as well) and the absolute minimum keys he really needs is around ~25.

He also absolutely dumpsters me at typing speed, be it normal text or special character heavy code, and I type around 90wpm with an ergodox and 110wpm with traditional layout.

Ted?

I would guess that they can be used for writing Japanese (Tokyo keyboard meetup..) via kana, and choosing conversions to kanji suggested by software, perhaps with those thumb buttons.

It's just a guess.

I also would like to know about if there are any ergonomic health research about these keyboards. Which one is the more efficient? Or the one more healthy?

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