Hey Framework community,
So, I recently purchased a framework 13 - I’ve been loving it, and I’ve been having a plethora of very positive impressions, but I’m writing this to focus on the things that I realized very quickly that I was missing. I’ll share some feedback specifically about the keyboard module that I hope might be useful for future iterations.
I don’t know how many of these things can be realistically implemented but I feel it is worth sharing my perspective anyways. If the implementation challenges are primarily financial/logistical as opposed to technical perhaps a tiered approach with basic and premium keyboard modules could work and enable you to bring us some of these features.
Dedicated navigation keys (PgUp, PgDn, Home, End)
That’s by far my biggest pain point. I use these keys extensively for coding and navigation and having to hold down Fn to access them makes things unnecessarily convoluted. Especially in scenarios where I want to select chunks of text with the keyboard, I have to hold down Shift in addition to engaging and disengaging the Fn key to switch between the arrow keys and those navigation keys, it can get hectic. I guess I can try to git gud but if I have the option of not having to deal with it at all, and have dedicated keys instead, I choose that.
The full-sized left/right arrow keys could be reduced to the size of the up/down keys making space for at least two more similarly sized keys.
F-row keys separated in groups of four
Most full-size keyboards group keys in sets of four. I think many people are very accustomed to it. It makes reaching for an arbitrary F-key so much easier. I’d love to have it.
Individual key backlight control
Having control over the lighting of individual keys, apart from enabling us to do just cool stuff, would also offer a lot of functional benefits.
For example the issue about the F-key groupings that I mentioned above could alternatively be solved if we had the ability to alternate the backlight brightness every four keys so they would still be recognizable at less than a glance, potentially just with one’s peripheral vision.
Transparent & colored panel
similar to the screen bezel options. This one has absolutely nothing to do with quality of life and ux, but it would be absolutely kickass if we could have the color to match the bezel and at the same time be able to have the laptop’s internals displayed through the keyboard module’s panel. I realize that this might be completely unfeasible because of materials and molds and whatnot but I really couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I realize these are significant modifications/additions but I believe they would substantially improve the daily user experience of many of your users.
Has the framework team considered any of those enhancements in the past? Have they decided against any of them specifically and if yes have they made the reason known?