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Does anyone know what it is like to use M0110 everyday? I know there are plenty of people that use their Model M as a daily. But I have hardly heard of anyone using M0110s...
I do, because I did back in the day. I'll let others talk about the key feel, switches and pinging, and I'll focus on the physical/logical layout.
The M0110 layout is not good, for a simple reason: the absolute lack of navigation keys, which forces you to navigate with the mouse
(Sanctimonious Steve's idea, quickly proven to be a bad one). For a guy like my father, who wrote unending texts with minimal editing, this was fine; for a guy like me, a programmer, the limiting navigation was a serious misfeature that hindered usability
heavily.
There are other problems, like the lack of an Esc key, that can be more or less mitigated in the same manner as it's done in a modern 60%; the lack of a numpad is a total pest if you write in numbers a lot, but can otherwise not be an issue. The absence of an F row wasn't an issue while using a Macintosh keyboard on a Macintosh computer (duh), but using it on a modern PC, wellllllll...
Anyhoo, navigation
(and the F row): the HHKB layout (which is "heavily based" on the M0110) mitigated this problem by splitting the right Shift and placing a (single, rightside) Fn key to access navigation commands
(and the F row, and Insert, the actual Delete, etc.); this CAN be copied on the M0110, by remapping the right Option key (which would cease to be the right-side Ctrl key), but its location on the bottom row instead of the Shift row makes it rather uncomfortable; remember M0110 keyboards have a latching Caps Lock, so mapping Ctrl there requires modding the keyboard.
When Jobs was fired from Apple, one of the very first thing the Apple engineers did was to replace the M0110 keyboard (along with the M0120) with the M0110A. This model also has its problems (gratuituous elbow Enter, limited right-side mods), BUT it does add cursor keys (and a numpad), and that DID alleviate things a lot.
If you want to daily drive an M0110, I'd suggest getting an M0110A instead (an earlier one, with SKCC switches instead of the later Mitsumi stuff, for the "true" feel and ping). They're more easily found, so you'll even have to pay less for it.
HTH!
