TouchCursor

I’ve been a keyboard Luddite ever since the Windows key was invented and have held onto my faithful old beige model for about ten years, afraid of having to retrain my fingers. In spite of this, I discovered that I quite liked the feel of the keyboard on my wife’s laptop, and with TouchCursor installed I didn’t really miss having the normal cursor key layout. So when the keys on my old keyboard started to stick, I decided to try something compact and laptop-like, with squashed-up cursor keys and no numeric keypad. The A4 Tech “X-Slim” KL-5UP looked nice and was cheap enough not to be much of a gamble.

I got the UK version, as that’s what I’m used to, but there are some significant deviations from a traditional UK layout: Normally there are three punctuation keys to the right of the ‘L’, but on this keyboard there are only two. The missing ‘#’ key has been moved above the Enter key and duplicated next to the Alt key. Normally on a UK keyboard, the Enter key is nice and big and covers two rows, but here the relocated ‘#’ key takes up half of this space. The Enter key is the same height as all the other keys (US-style). Also, there is no right-hand Ctrl key—Insert is positioned there instead. A picture is probably in order…

Adjustment

At first I found myself hitting ‘#’ or Page Down instead of Enter, Enter instead of ‘#’, and the Up-arrow instead of Shift. The ‘#’ key next to Alt was disastrous, as holding it down instead of Alt would result in a line of hash characters zooming across my document.

I used the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to move ‘#’ to Shift+3, like the US layout, and I moved the ‘£’ symbol to AltGr+3. I disabled the original ‘#’ keys altogether. It wasn’t possible to remap these individually as the two ‘#’ keys have the same scan code. I left the ‘~’ character on Shift+#, as that doesn’t cause accidents. [1]

I restored the missing right Ctrl by putting it on the strangely-positioned Insert key with SharpKeys. I can manage without an Insert key, as I rarely use it, and TouchCursor gives it to me on Space+Y anyway.

The function keys are hard to distinguish, as they’re not grouped into sets of four like I’m used to. On a conventional keyboard I can touch type some of the function keys, or at least target them with my peripheral vision, but here they are too small and bunched together. Sticking bits of fluorescent post-it note above F5 and F9 has helped, but it’s still too easy to hit a number key instead.

In summary

The good:

• It’s compact — My mouse now sits where the numeric keypad would have been, so it is not so far to move my hand. (Also, I used to annoy myself regularly by banging the mouse into the side of my old keyboard. This no longer seems to happen.)
• The key action is pleasant — to my taste — with a fairly short travel and a firm-ish resistance.
• It’s cheap!

The surmountable (with re-programming and re-learning):

• Small (US-style) Enter key.
• Non-standard ‘#’ locations.
• No right Ctrl key.

The bad:

• Small function keys in a compressed layout.
• Too many keys to the left of the space bar.
• No means to tilt the keyboard forward.
• When you want to use the standard cursor key layout, it’s not there.

Overall, it is nice to have a smaller keyboard and, using TouchCursor, I hardly miss the standard cursor keys, but I’m not in love with this keyboard. If I stumble across an alternative with fewer compromises I expect I’ll switch.

Notes:

[1] If you have this keyboard and want to try my remapped keys, you can install my keyboard layout.