Ah! You beat me in putting in inverted T arrows.
What I was thinking:
Well, I was trying to keep the six keys above the arrows on the regular keyboard in their original arrangement, as Shawn Stanford had originally requested, if I could.
The second arrangement is interesting, but is there really that much use for the context menu key?
With the elimination of that key, you can group scroll lock and pause/break,
And here I was thinking I dumped the Windows Menu key in left-over space. I had been intentionally keeping Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause next to each other in that order to preserve their relationship on the regular keyboard.
Model F-style springs.
Why not go whole hog? Capacitative circuit board... 3278-style key and spring assembly!
I work with the cursor T constantly, so it has to be within easy reach and it has to be a T. The split solutions and the top of the board concept won't work for me.
Well, I've tried. To be a T, and to also be not far from the six large-movement keys, as someone else requested, pretty much eliminates the kind of design I was playing with - to satisfy both conditions, one pretty much does have to keep it simple, and just go to the Space Saver type keyboard for which there is a petition.
Some people like the HHKB, others don't, and for the mass market, at least, the most common space-saving keyboard seems to be an imitation laptop arrangement.
From my own experience, the fanciest cursor key arrangement is the traditional + arrangement, the T being something peculiar to the IBM PC. But if you work on more than one computer, naturally you want all the computers you work with to have the same layout.
Of course, my previous keyboard idea was for one that was heavily customizable, but it seems to me that the issues with this design can't be solved with different modes that move keys around, because the physical location and width of keys is different depending on which type of layout is desired.
So it's looking like I can't satisfy, in the same design, even with alternate keyboard arrangements, both your requirements and those of some of the others. And I didn't even like my last attempt myself that much, because the only keyboard designs I've seen with the function keys in two rows of six seemed to be unpreposessing ones, so doing that might get the keyboard confused with cheap, inferior keyboards - not a good thing if we want to persuade someone to make it as a premium product.
I may be giving up too quickly - and the ideal keyboard for you, with eight rows of keys, may not in fact cause any manufacturing issues. After all, a 122-key keyboard has eight rows of keys, and Unicomp makes those. Maybe I'll think of something - or someone else will.
