The keyboard on my FW16 is pretty good. I have just a keyboard, and no num-pad etc.
I think the arrow keys could be improved.
I normally hold my hands at a slight diagonal to the keyboard.
In this position, if I hold my fingers over the arrow keys, my index/first finger is above the “Left/Home” key. My Second finger is on the “Up/Pg” key, and my third finger is over the gap between the “Right/End” key and the Shift key. Also by just feeling, it is sometimes difficult to know if my finger is on the “Up/Pg” or “Down/Pg” key, so some sort of larger gap feeling between them would be better.
So, my suggestion is:
The “Left/Home” key should be made a full sized key.
The “Right/End” key should be made a full sized key
The “Up/Pg” key should have a taper on the edge furthest from the screen.
The “Down/Pg” key should have a taper on the edge closest to the screen.
The tapers would make it easier to feel the gap between the “Up/Pg” and “Down/Pg” key.
With the keys as per my suggestion, My first finger would be on the “Left/Home” key, my second finger would easily be able to tell which key it was over “Up/Pg” or “Down/Pg” key, and my third finger would be over the “Right/End” key.
Ah! I.e. almost back to how the FW13 did it?
Is it possible to remove single keys from the keyboard? I could maybe then experiment with my own key shapes.
The keyboard backlight also needs improvement. The LED is purple/violet-ish, which contribute to blue light hazard and it flickers like a CRT screen when the brightness is not the highest.
@Charlie_6
Isn’t there a different keyboard one can purchase that has multi-colours that would solve your point about blue-light?
“RGB US English” keyboard.
The RGB one is more expensive, so maybe a keyboard with yellow instead of white LED would help keep costs down.
I come from years of using MacBook Pro keyboards and have gotten used to the FW16 keyboard pretty quickly. So much better layout than the keyboard on my Lenovo ThinkPad T14 laptops that I’ve been testing Linux distros with.
In my case, I prefer having half-height keys for Left and Right as it provide a much better indication for my pinky on arrow key placement.
The only change that I would make is to make the Left and Right arrow keys sit a bit closer to the Up and Down arrow keys, and have the inner edges of the Up and Down arrow keys taper in. Having the taper on the outside could work as well.
The first thing that I had to do with my keyboard was to swap the Left Ctrl and Fn key around and toying with the idea of swapping the Right Alt and Ctrl keys around, again since I’m more used to the Apple keyboard layout. If I do the latter, I would have to swap the keycaps around (I have stickers coming in to relabel the left keys).