I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys

F12 is Save As. Yes I have to use MS Office at work.

Apple is hardly the first to have used "natural" scrolling.

While I have no idea who was, I do know that John Ousterhout's text editor and terminal emulators Mx and Tx used "natural scrolling", made pre-1989. Their scroll mechanism is shift + left/right click then drag, using "natural scrolling", e.g. push mouse up to scroll down. Left click scrolls normally, right click scrolls quickly.

No. I bought it especially, because it has a replacable battery, which is not a factor for the vast majority I believe.

If that key would not have been switchable I would have returned it, though ..

But seriously. Who would want that excemption, unless they have already been trained in the non standard way?

Ctrl key I have to use very often. Bottom left is easy to find, even blind.

But the fn Key? Only needed at very rare occasions, so why waste the special ergonomic place for it?

I'm typing on a SoflePLUS2 right now. It's based on the Sofle v2 design, which is described as having a 5-key thumb arc per side. But I try to limit thumb use to the innermost 2 or 3 keys per side after experiencing fatigue. I use the outermost 2 or 3 as opposite-hand modifiers (ctrl, opt, cmd) and try to pull my whole arm in to use them with the same-column finger, instead of treating them as a thumb key that requires folding my thumb underneath my palm as I keep my hand in the home position.

It seems like many in the ergo keyboard crowd are trying to never move their hands from the home position, and I think that might be a mistake. Use a variety of muscles, avoid unnatural positions. More broadly, my understanding is that the research behind using a tented/splayed split keyboard is solid (better shoulder through wrist positioning) but there's nothing really but anecdotal experience supporting the idea that vastly reduced key counts (and associated need for complex layer setups) or column-staggered layouts reduce pain and plenty of confounders (going from unibody to split simultaneously, maybe switching from QWERTY at the same time too, reducing speed, often learning decent form for the first time, often regression to the mean because people switch when they are having problems).

My previous keyboard was a split with traditional row stagger (Goldtouch) that Google's ergo team advised me to try forever ago. I switched recently because I wasn't liking the mushy feel of the keys, that the two "space bars" weren't distinguishable, that it doesn't have an integrated pointing device, and that after such long use I'd worn down the homing indicator on the f/j keys and was struggling to orient my hands correctly. But row-staggered layout was fine IMHO. Made it easier to learn, to switch between it and other keyboards when I had to, and to hit keys further from the home position.

Here's something from Kinesis, who have been designing split ergonomic keyboards for a long time: https://kinesis-ergo.com/wp-content/uploads/Advantage360-ZMK... search for "If your thumbs are sensitive" and "Guidelines for using your thumbs". And note that while they have keys under z/x/c they do not describe them as thumb keys.

Sleep key is scancode E05F

In registry "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout"

Create Binary value named "Scancode Map"

Put in there: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 3E 00 5F E0 00 00 00 00

That changes scancode E05F (Sleep key) into scancode 3E (F4 key).

Then logout or reboot for the change to apply. I actually looked up what would be necessary to do this change without a reboot, and it turns out that only WinLogon.exe is allowed to make the Scancode Map change.