BernSh

The appeal of extending the keyboard with a small programmable keyboard depends on where on a kinesthetic scale you are coupled with how comfortable with touch typing and learning keyboard combinations you are and how much visual esthetics impact you, and how committed/interested you find tweaking your workflow (insert chart or venn diagram). 

As someone who finds the pressure/sensation of typing uncomfortable on my fingertips, a power user with far far too many keyboard combos to mess with beyond the dozen or so ‘standards’, being visually very sensitive, and highly interested in the how works gets done, the idea of having yet another keyboard to clutter my visual space and hunt for ever changing commands has little appeal. 

 

For me, putting up onscreen Keyboard Maestro palettes right where I need them like a delete symbol right over the spam mailbox in mail that selects all then deletes them and returns me to the inbox is far more elegant and match for me then looking down and finding a key on the desk then having to look back to reorient my vision on the screen again.

For me, reducing the number of actions, even very very simple fast ones, is a major goal especially when I don’t need to change the visual field.

When first getting into making on screen palettes, I too when way down the rabbit hole of making icons and arranging them and the app windows. It was way fun and instructive regarding how I work and think. Also very rewarding when I achieved a good outcome.

What I came to realized is that mostly it’s about (for me) putting onscreen, menu or context menu commands for one click execution or when possible, having two to maybe four commands fire in sequence. Beyond four commands gets progressively much more difficult to program and keep stable especially if you UI script rather then use a language to script like AppleScript. 

This is where I am in the matrix of the above variables. Given my experience, I suspect I’m an outlier and very few will share these preferences.