Maltron moved the arrow keys and modifiers. What reason?

[urlwolf]

I wonder if there's any research behind that, or user complaints, or what. I have the 89 model, with arrow keys in two thumb clusters. I wonder if I should remap or learn this weird way to move around. All feels good, but selecting text with ctrl shift arrows. That is virtually impossible.

[urlwolf]

Here are the pictures showing the differences:
http://www.maltron.com/keyboard-info/di ... oards.html

[Piers Cawley]

The thumb cluster is _way_ too valuable to be wasted on arrow keys. I've mapped most of the thumb keys to ctrl/alt/AltGr and, latterly, a jesse style 'blue-shift' and I move the cursor about with emacs style shortcuts. I've also got an inverted T cluster of arrows on <Blue Shift>-[YNIS], which works remarkably well.

[urlwolf]

Piers, I couldn't find anything about this blue shift. Can you share a link?

[vivalarevolución]

I find the 89 model Maltron to have the best thumb clusters of any keyboard that has thumb clusters. I never to move my hands to navigated documents. The theory behind the layout of the thumb clusters on the 89 model is to navigate the left/top/beginning of a document with the left thumb, and navigate to the right/bottom/end of a document with the right thumb.

Having those modifier keys in the thumb cluster also is very useful, much better than having to move my hand down or use my pinkies for those modifier keys.

Only complaint is that a bigger tab key would be nice. But then that would ruin the thumb clusters.

[Piers Cawley]

Piers, I couldn't find anything about this blue shift. Can you share a link?

http://deskthority.net/workshop-f7/a-re ... t4820.html

Just another reduced matrix layered design.