Cherry Strait - Nice Keyboard

MacBook keyboard aficionados may like the Cherry Strait. It has the feel of the MacBook keyboard. It is very flat. Little force is required to depress the keys.

Kudos to my colleague Daniel Flinkmann who suggested the Cherry Strait as a keyboard that looks and feels similar to the MacBook keyboards. I must say, I like the feel of the MacBook keyboard. Some folks may laugh and say that only the IBM Model 2 is the real keyboard (Das Keyboard anyone?). I let them laugh and I’m happy with this keyboard.

(Some years ago they laughed at me for using a Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2. They asked me whether I didn’t have enough money to buy a full keyboard.)

The only problem here is an oddity in the keyboard layout. There is a block of six keys above the cursor keys:

The Cherry Strait modifies this from a 3x2 format to a 2x3 format, like this:

And the position of the Home key at the bottom left and the End key at the top right, that’s just completely counter-intuitive. Home should not be at the bottom and End should not be at the top.

So I emailed their support and suggested to move things around, and they said that the keyboard layout had to be modified to maintain the design of this lifestyle product. I must say, that’s a weird response. It’s not necessary to change the 2x3 layout, we just need to move the keys around. I propose this layout:

I see the following advantages:

• Having Home on the left and End on the right makes complete sense. After all, usually, Home goes to the beginning of the line (i.e. to the left) and End goes to the end of the line (i.e. to the right).
• Having Insert in the left column on the middle is good because that spot is hard to find and most people don’t need the Insert key often. Makes sense to put the most seldom used key in the most inconvenient spot.
• Having Page Up above Page Down also makes complete sense based on what the keys do.