I like the slab form factors (One of my first portable computers was a Tandy Model 100) but I cannot understand how someone uses a keyboard that ...doesn't have at least all the letters and numbers and period/backslash/colon etc... especially for programming!

I mean I get by reading a bit from the hackaday post that there are combos or 'chords' and so I guess you are meant to memorize these chord claw combinations for things, and yes I see the videos of people claiming it can be fast etc etc but....

man I just don't get how someone could just unlearn the muscle memory of a normal keyboard layout. I had a partner with a Spanish layout keyboard macbook where a just a few keys are mixed around compared to ANSI and even after sitting with it many times it was still nearly un-useable for me... and that was just a few keys swapped around!

I have noticed all the people building and using these reduced-key-count keyboards on youtube are all very young people. So maybe it has something to do with still having a pliable brain and not having decades of muscle memory to get past.

The ergo community loves their 40% keyboards. The reasoning is that your fingers can not reach large number of keys anyways without moving the whole hand, and by eliminating the hand/wrist movement you can be more ergonomic even if it leads to more keypresses.

Same thinking can be applied to speed too, hand repositioning and finger-stretching are not fast things to do, so concentrating functionality near home positions allows you to do the keypresses very fast which trades off the number of keypresses.

This all said, I personally haven't used such keyboards, this is more of second hand impressions

I thought the ergo community loved their split, ortho, big ass keyboards? I just bought an used Kinesis (the simple one though), love to see if it improves my wrist pain.