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Comment by jolt | Hacker News Reader

I use the numpad for every number i type on my keyboard. It's much faster and the time/energy i would save by having to move my hand a shorter distance to the mouse, is no where near the amount of time/energy i save by not having to look at the keyboard and find each individual number.

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I have been typing with 10 fingers blind for over 30 years now and I have used, first, the little nob some laptops had/have as mouse and now the trackpad on the Macbook; I don't lift/move my hand from the keyboard at all to use all keys and hardly for the mouse (trackpad). I type really fast at that, including numbers. A numpad on a laptop would be rather a waste of space and would slow me down as well as I would miss my right hand when typing words instead of numbers.

I can see it's handy for some people (like most people like an actual mouse) but I do see the OP his point; at least here most shops carry mostly laptops with numpads and they are not an option. The choices are heavily limited because of this.

> the time/energy i would save by having to move my hand a shorter distance to the mouse, is no where near the amount of time/energy i save by not having to look at the keyboard and find each individual number.

This isn't true for the vast majority of people, because they don't enter enough numbers for it to make sense. Moreover, if you learn how to touchtype the number keys above the letter keys, it's actually not that much slower than using the numpad.

I felt exactly the same way when I first got a keyboard without a numpad. Then I realized that I should just get used to touch typing on the number row instead. Though I still prefer a numpad (old habits die hard), using the num-row really isn't that bad once you get the hang of it.

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