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Comment by DanHulton | Hacker News Reader

How does everyone continue to get the keyboard wrong on these?

If the left and right arrows are full-size I know it's going to be miserable to use. Probably worse than miserable, because clearly nobody who ever uses the keyboard a serious amount has actually sat down and used it, or the arrow situation would have been fixed _immediately._ Who knows what else is terrible about the keyboard, given that it was pretty obviously not seriously tested?

(I'm poking a bit of fun here, but this _is_ still a dealbreaker for me. I use those keys plenty, and full-height left/right arrows are indeed _miserable_ to use - it's basically impossible to quickly center your hand on them from home row.)

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I have a keyboard that has this exact arrow key layout and… idk it’s fine? I think within a day I was completely used to it. I’m actually kind of confused what the complaint is with full height left/right. That it’s harder to locate them by touch?

I'm also confused but very interested based on this being a big enough deal to be a deal breaker. Maybe he wants them smaller ?

I think the up/down not being full size is a bigger deal but even that is not a deal breaker

There seems to be this obsession to make keyboards perfectly rectangular; never quite understood this.

That said, although I agree it's not ideal, I've generally had little difficulty adjusting to these types of weird arrow key shapes, or things like odd locations for home, end, etc.

What always bothers me is the lack of gaps on the function keys. F8 and F9 turn the brightness up and down. How are you supposed to use those on touch? You can't really, not without those gaps to guide you. Sounds like a little thing, but it's always been a pain on every laptop I've had that didn't have those gaps. This, and the physical trackpad buttons, are a big part of why I generally use ThinkPads whenever I have the chance.

What's the right design in your opinion ? super curious as I'm trying to figure out based on your comment. I have never even thought about this and I bet if it is the wrong design, it continues to be repeated for the same reason.

I guess I'm honestly wondering, who cares ? (not dismissive, what type of person/work and what design!?) fwiw I'm an eng and a big gamer so I'm constantly using keyboards and I can't remember ever caring or using those keys much.

To you, perhaps. I've used laptop keyboards with similar full height left/right arrows and adapted to it pretty quick. I certainly didn't find it miserable.

Well, speak for yourself. I have a HP ZBook and Metabox laptops with keyboard that is almost identical to that of StarBook and I am very happy with that layout. Can't stand the Mac laptop style keyboards (which makes Framework laptops a no-go for me) that lack separate home/end/pgup/pgdown keys. I will be looking for a new laptop in the next 12 months so StarBook will be on top of my list.

Hey, Odin here from Starlabs! The site is now live with the new product pics, hopefully we will be holding many Starfighters within 12 months from now. Glad your considering Starlabs, feel free to reach out to the team to answer your q's! Best Odin

If they can't get the basics right, who knows what horrors lurk under the hood.

I prefer my "h" and "l" keys to be full sized.

For any serious work I'm using hjkl.

Yeah, not great (and you can have PgUp PgDn still if you use a modern ThinkPad-style layout, let alone the never-gonna-happen-again perfect 7-row style).

Having the Home/PgUp/PgDn/End column on the right is the worst laptop layout to me though. I had a Vaio like that and even after using it as my main computer for 5 years it never ceased to annoy me that I had couldn't just put my hands down centered on the laptop, but had to shift my hands over to the left (or move the whole laptop right and tilt my head). And even Sony wasn't dumb enough to put a power button in the top right that you'll only hit by mistake when trying to delete.

hjkl :P

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