For anybody interested, here's my experience with 40% boards including the mobik. This is copy pasted from reddit so bare with me.
A lot of people have asked about 40% boards.
They're something kind of new starting mainly with the JD40 from less than 2 years ago.
They took off especially with the Planck (however I started with the JD40 and moved to the GoN MobiK).
I'll be writing about my experiences using 40% boards (mainly the MobiK in this case because I haven't owned the Planck and sold the JD40 fairly early on).
What are the main thoughts that people have in respect to 40% boards? (I'll be mostly referring to the standard staggared layout and not the ortho layout of the Planck or custom layouts that people have designed for their personal use).
The first is that it's tiny.
On one hand that's good for people who want a smaller board especially for portable use.
On the other hand you might not need the extra space compared to a 60%.
My experience with it is that 40% does offer a significant improvement for portable use over a 60% board.
When you consider the limited bag space that most are left with and the case you're going to want (and trust me, you will want one), the 40% gives a significant break in bag space.
Consider that the board is smaller on the length and width of the board because of the missing keys (no number stripe or punctuation section). You're saving about 1cm on the width and 2-3 on the length depending on the model.
I know I bring a lot of stuff to school with me.
Books, notepads, pens (fountain pens of course), calculators and other tools, food, coffee, coffee, etc.
So I've been trying to bring different boards with me to school over the past year and the 40% boards were a lot easier to bring.
I've tried TKL, 60% and 40%.
TKL is just a pain and extremely unnecessary.
60% is fair and depending on your situation is very usable.
40% gave me the most space (logically, it shouldn't be any different).
Remember, I'm just writing about my experiences with 40% boards so this is just how they fared with my uses.
But I found the extra space very handy.
Obviously this has to be weighed against the loss of key real estate.
So the main part of this is how much that real estate matters.
What is the 40% layout? Well, different crafters have made slight variations for the trade offs, but in general the entire numpad is removed, all the nav cluster removed (no page up, down, arrows, etc.), the F stripe AND number stripe removed with the punctuation stripe removed.
What does that leave you with?
You have your alphas, modifiers and a few keys here and there that you can remap.
Now this means that in general you're remapping almost all the non-character (alphabet) keys to an Fn layer.
This is the part that most people will have a problem with.
What are the initial thoughts?
-I can't live without the numper stripe.
-I can't live with the punctuation being on an Fn layer.
-Switching between this layout and my X sized board will be confusing
And all of those points are quite important.
My first point is that most of my typing is done in regular english language where I'll mostly be just using the alphas, basic punctuation (which I've mapped to various keys on the bottom row) and modifiers. Using a 40% i this case hasn't been a bother. If anything it's actually been more comfortable because the modifiers on the right side are closer and I have to move my hands less.
When do those lack of keys come into play?
Well, I'm in finance and when I'm taking notes with the Mobik about equations and numbers, it definitely plays a role. I designed my Fn1 layer to be all the punctuation and numbers (basically everything removed from 60 to 40%) and placed them relating to where they would be on a TKL. Numbers are layered under the Qwerty row (similar to how the F stripe is layered under the number stripe on 60%). I layered the punctuation in order of where the punctuation would be on a full sized. So for example, - is to the left of = and both of those are layered on the right side of the keyboard (under K and L).
I layered the arrow keys under DXCV for the purpose of having the tilda key on the left and having [ and ] on the S and F keys.
This means that all the main punctuation is accessible by a one handed short cut while the lesser used punctuation is to the left of the keyboard. I did map an Fn key on the left of the board so I canone hand arrows and other things if necessary but I rarely use this. (Describing by text is confusing, see the album at the end for the visual representation of the layers).
So has this made a significant impact in my typing when I have to use non-basic punctuation and typing numbers more often?
YES
The need for a shortcut has slightly slowed down my typing speed when typing with these numbers and characters mapped to Fn layers.
It's an extra stroke. So consider that with a normal keyboard you'd be saving 3 key strokes per sentence, you'd be better off.
I'm not going to lie and say that typing on a 40% hasn't slowed down my typing, even after a few months I still feel slower on a 40% because of the need for extra srokes. Has it had a significan impact? Not particularly. If I were using certain punctuation more regularly (say, for coding) I'd probably just map things differently to make it more effective for that. However, you'll probably end up with a similar situation that when moving to another use you either have to remap or suffer slight decreases in speed relating to the need for extra strokes.
But, BUT!
There's a silver lining.
What has that silver lining been? Stay tuned.
For now I'll just quickly talk about the switching between layouts.
As my flair would suggest, I have a TKL in Japanese layout at home that I switch out with a HHKB which is a different 60% layout and for portable use I have the GoN mobik 40%.
I use 3 very different layouts on a regular basis and that's not including the one I was using for work at the post office where I had a decent amount of data entry.
Just for my general use, I have not had a problem switching between the layouts.
All the keyboards are still in a qwerty fashion in the way that the modifiers, alphas and such are placed / layered.
So no I haven't had any problems swithcing between them.
The only time I kind of had a problem is coming back after the summer break. As I mentioned, the MobiK is my main portable board and during the summer I don't have class so I don't use it nearly as often. The key mappings escaped me for the first day coming back to it but since I mapped it in a way that was logical to me it wasn't too much of a problem.
So no, I don't feel that having keyboards with different but similar layouts and switching between them regularly has impacted my effectiveness on any particular board.
Now, to the silver lining and one consideration that I've seen some people have and others dismiss or ignore, the need for hand movement.
Typing on my 40% has improved my touch typing ability because there's nothing else to do. you have to touch type to use a 40%. There's no hand movement to do, it's all in the fingers and I've found that when moving to my bigger keyboards the same touch typing abilities tended to transfer over. You can reach all the keys when positioned on the home row on a 40% but I can't say the same thing for TKL or even the HHKB.
Along with that, since real estate is quite valuable on a 40%, a lot of the layouts tend ot shrink the size of modifiers and this is very problematic with using standard keysets. When I ordered the Infinity PBT DSA set on massdrop I had to order all the bottom row kits to have enough keys of the right sizes to fit my MobiK.
The JD40 was even worse for that respect.
**In conclusion I do not regret the MobiK purchase (or other 40%). I find it has no purpose being a daily driver for a desk. The room saved on a desk over a 60% is negligible IMO but the room saved in a bag is not, so for a portable board I highly recommend it. A 60% is more versatile and if you need the arrow keys, there's the FC660C/M.**
**The moving of essential keys to an Fn layer has added keystrokes to my typing and that means slower typing speeds.**
**The need for touch typing on a 40% has improved my touch typng sills overall across all my keyboards and the switching between a 40% and other staggared qwerty layouts has not affected me negatively.**
Thanks for reading and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments for me to read.
Edit:
Here are the albums I promised
[Layout](
http://imgur.com/a/C9fQ3)
[Mobik album 1](
http://imgur.com/a/zJ9R0)
[Mobik album 2](
http://imgur.com/a/ZrGT9)
That last album has a lot of duplicates because I was plying with the white balance with the camera to try and get the right colors for the adler set.