Thanks for these additional boards to look at for compatibility. Your input has been really helpful throughout this IC.
I did intentionally remove the R3 Pg Up and R4 Pg Dn so I could add the 2u Shift. I’m trying to find the right balance of compatibility and price and it’s definitely a hard balance to strike!
Ultimately I want to please everyone but I know that wouldn’t be possible. Now, I know you’re one voice but would you say you’re representative of many 65% users? Additionally, if things go according to plan I should have novelties to cover every row that could be used in the right column. Would that be a sufficient alternative to correct legends for somebody like yourself?
Thank you for your feedback!
I think I'm definitely among the most vocal advocates of R3 PgUp, R4 PgDn (together with oldcat), but I'm happy to say that I've been seeing more and more people request these keys in ICs over the past 6–12 months. A lot of people, in fact, if you take a look at other IC threads. I think one of the reasons why these keys have seen a resurgence in popularity (they used to be popular back in the day, around the time when Whitefox R1 and GMK Muted first ran) is Drop's ALT keyboard. This is arguably the most common 65% board out in the wild currently, and it features these keys in its default layout and keycaps. Many of new users have consequently adopted them as part of their preferred 65% layout.
If I had to rank the keys we've been discussing in terms of objective popularity / presence in the community, I would say: R3 PgUp R4 PgDn > 2u Shift ≈ second 2.25u Shift. This isn't taking into account the ability to use the Shifts as space keys, for reasons that Voodoo outlined above. That
≈ depends on who your target audience is, though; more on that below.
Happy to be of help!
Since the extra Shift keys probably won't be used as spacebars (wrong profile; actual spacebars available), I can understand why one would omit the 2.25u Shift. That being said, you could omit the 2u Shift for the same reasons. I'm not sure which one is more rare: 2u or 2.25u Shift?
In a bares bones set with strong MOQ limitations, I would probably remove both. (Then again, I am a Minila owner.)
Those sets were run on Massdrop and thus weren't subject to the same limitations.
You are correct about the wrong profile, I had forgotten about that. I think the fairly aggressive SA R4 profile is going to reduce the number of people who opt to use the Shifts as space keys, even if flipped. So the space keys argument isn't as applicable here as I initially posited.
The question of which is rarer, 2u or second 2.25u, depends on who the majority of your buyers are going to be. 2u Shift layouts are not that common in the Western community, and I think 66-key users may well outnumber 2u Shift users here — but they are
very popular with Eastern audiences, mainly because of the GK64 and its clones. This is why we've been seeing recent sets that ran on Drop, e.g. MiTo's Belafonte and Hennessey, include 2u Shift (and even 1u Shift and R4 1u Delete), since there are a lot of Asian buyers there. In this particular case, I believe the decision to include those keys over certain other options was based on audience research conducted by MiTo.
For all of the reasons we've mentioned, I would consider forgoing the second 2.25u Shift, but I would definitely keep R3 PgUp and R4 PgDn and, maybe, 2u Shift as well. Then again, replacing 2u Shift with 2.25u might be a good way to go, too.
