…They are, to my knowledge, always situated in the worst possible place on the keyboard. The place you can’t press them with a rested arm.
All keys at the bottom of the keyboard are in that place. It’s the place where your arm is in contact with the table on which the keyboard sits when you press them. On all keyboards I’ve seen or used the play, stop, back, forward,volume up, volume down, etc… keys are placed at the top, where you have to hover your arm to avoid pressing other keys.
In fact on my particular keyboard they are the ONLY keys I can’t press when the palm of my hand has somewhere to rest.
Would the Avant Stellar work for you? It’s apparently thoroughly remappable/programmable, though I haven’t tried it myself. (I own one, but haven’t tried programming it.)
I’d be pissed if the programmable keys WERE within easy “Touch-typing” range. They’d probably have to move either my touchpad, or replace a bracket key or some other such basically “useless” key.
The QWERTY keyboard is like 50 years old, they weren’t planning for us to have a hotkey to bring up MS Word or run a macro when they designed it way back when.
I know I’ve got 5 “hot keys” at the top of my laptop, above the F1-F12 keys, to open IE, search, open outlook, etc… I’ve never used it once intentionally.
The “classic” US/UK PC keyboard layout* isn’t nearly that old, though - I think it only dates back to 1988 or so.
*104 total keys, 12 Function keys, d-pad in the middle, number pad on the right, etc. It’s not even that old if you only go back to where the Windows key showed up in 1995.
There’s always a ton of unused space in between the F keys and the Print Screen/Scroll Lock/Break clump. The makers of this keyboard I’m using now thoughtfully placed a Dell logo there, but multimedia keys would fit nicely- or at least better than on extraneous plastic above the F keys.
I have a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse combo. What annoys me is that despite the fact that I’ve told the software to do NOTHING on the press of certain buttons on the keyboard or mouse, they still do it!!
Worst of all, these buttons are in a spot that’s easy to bump and so I end up closing windows I don’t want to, or going back pages on a web site when I don’t want to. ARGH!
I’ve stopped using the keyboard for now, but there are days I’d cheerfully like to fling my mouse against the wall.
My Microsoft wireless optical mouse just died so we’re using the wifey’s old GE wired optical mouse at the moment. It has giant programmable buttons on each side where the thumb and pinky finger go, which require virtually no pressure to activate their pressure sensors.
Result is it’s almost impossible to navigate web pages without accidentally going back and forward five times per minute.
The annoying one is if you get a computer with a Sleep button on it. Unlike anything else in Windows, you’d press that button and everything would just immediately power off and be gone.
Can’t - Windows doesn’t have a native driver for it and for some reason GE’s website doesn’t offer it as a download. I don’t really understand how the programmable buttons are working at all.
Anyway, it’s no big deal 'cause I’m buying a new mouse - or, God willing, a nice trackball - but until then it’s annoying.
The Microsoft Powertoy Tweak UI is your friend. With it you can override at the OS level any “command key” button (such as browser forward/back, play/pause, open email, et al) from a keyboard or mouse. I have used it to map my useless “media” keys on my logitech keyboard to run applications that I actually use on a regular basis.
