MY personal opinion is that on small keyboards (which yours almost certainly is seeing that it has 4.5u space and you are not Japanese), one should not go for SA profile. SA is too high and forces you to use a wrist rest and other bulky things thus defeating the purpose of having a small keyboard that you can carry around.
Words of knowledge and wisdom, thanks for these.
So I went and browsed the SP profiles documentations (great sources).
While the height difference with OEM seems negligible on paper, once converted in angle it is not indeed.
But I've been using laptops with chicklets for so long now (where there are close to no angle and wrists are always on contact) that I'm afraid even only the height of the case (poker like one) won't allow me to type correctly without a rest pad. And when I float type my little finger attach by it own will to the side of the caps lock key, so...
In my case the choice for 60% was not mobility (even if after trying this mechanical, I'll surely bring it along in my travels, damn it's so nice to type on this) but to gain a little desk estate and first to reduce distance to the trackball.
I feel it insane to have extra-big cursor keys. I am living my life happily with 1x space keys and return keys.
Wow 1x space keys sounds insane, guess I would need at least 2... I have no problem with 1x shift, backspace, enter (turned the right shift just under the Enter key which really outputs 'return' :/ into an enter key), alt, ctrl.... though.
So, not to pour salt in a wound, but I made these remarks here:
* KBT Pure Pro - a very unfortunate keyboard design. As someone who designs and builds keyboards myself, I can tell you without hesitation that this is one of the worst keyboard designs I've ever encountered. If you purchased the Pure Pro, it's my opinion that the folks at Vortex duped you into buying their terrible product, which they dubbed with the "Pure" moniker in order to try and capitalize on a very good previous design. Marketing bait and switch, as it were.
I feel the need to follow up to those remarks, and this seems like a good place for it.
When one is looking to purchase a new mechanical keyboard, many factors are weighed in the decision of which model to purchase. There are a myriad of options with all the keyboards on the market right now, and sometimes it can seem almost overwhelming. Then you make a choice, and upon receipt of your new pride and joy, you realize that there may exist shortcomings that you never noticed during your research before purchase. One of the shortcomings that most people fail to consider (usually because they are inexperienced, and simply don't recognize it as a shortcoming) is the inclusion of non-standard sized keys on a keyboard. What I consider "standard" are the well-known ANSI and ISO keyboard layouts. Now, sometimes, when designing a keyboard it is necessary to make compromises with regard to key sizing, due to design constraints. Take for example my own JD40 keyboard. The design of the JD40 was made around the decision to have a 4-row by 12-column keyboard layout. That necessitates some compromises in the design when it comes to key sizing, because I was trying to "fit a 60% peg into a 40% hole," as it were.
Now, mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, like you and I, are a special breed. We are not content with "stock" anything. We, especially those of us here, are modders and hackers, geeks of the highest order. While non-standard keys are no concern at all to the user of a typical rubber dome keyboard, they can be a thorn in the side to those of us who are constantly changing the keycaps we put on our beloved keyboards. How can we be expected to live with stock keycaps, when we take the time to do things like modify the very switches under those keycaps, by lubing them and replacing the stock springs with custom made units from Korea?
In contrast to some of the more standard 60% designs like the Poker X, Poker II, and the Pure before it, the Pure Pro, on the other hand, makes compromises with regard to key sizing seemingly for one purpose only -- the inclusion of dedicated cursor arrows on a 60% keyboard. While this seems like an admirable goal, it forces major compromises in the key sizing, which to most enthusiasts are simply not acceptable. If you ever intend to replace the stock keycaps on your Pure Pro, you are going to be hard pressed to find replacements which fill fit all the non-standard keys on that keyboard. If those compromises are necessary to accommodate dedicated cursor arrows on a 60% keyboard, then inclusion of the arrows is simply not worth the trade-offs, in my opinion. You are better off with cursor arrows being assigned to a function layer on some other set of keys.
TL;DR - the inclusion of dedicated cursor arrows is not worth the trade off of so many non-standard key sizes, which precludes changing the stock keycaps to better aftermarket replacements.
I'm very glad you took the time to respond, thanks for this.
The really bad move in my case was to go azerty ISO, because in the end, and for now, I found ANSI US qwerty the most intellectually satisfying layout for coding (if you except the size of the backslash key) so I had to change caps, this and wanting to mimic the macbook pro layout I'm so used to.
Yes maybe arrows are evil in the end, I made this choice based on shortcuts I'm used to for some programs, some already involving 2 modifiers so it sounded like less hassle, especially when some keyboards have only one FN key on the right side. Now it maybe looks even more stupid as I do 98% of text editing in vim where these keys are useless. Maybe I should have considered changing these shortcuts... or turn on one of Karabiner vim mode to have vim shortcuts System wide.
Anyway, the jump to the mechanicals was already been quiet a journey! I may look into JD45, GH60 or such in the future.
