How to Pick Your Size and Layout

Keyboards come in a wide variety of shapes and designs. Some are truly wacky, but sticking with more traditional rectangular boards, you have three main options as to size and style.

Full-size keyboards have all the keys you could ever want: a full suite of letters and numbers (obviously) but also arrow keys, a row of F1-F12 function keys above the numbers and a dedicated numpad. This is your safest bet, with a few minor downsides. Bigger mechanical keyboards are generally more expensive, and they have a larger footprint on your desk.

Tenkeyless boards are a full-size keyboard, but without the numpad. Simple! After all, you can just pick up a numpad separately if you really miss it.

60 percent keyboards dispense with the numpad, but also function keys and, most notably, arrow keys. In lieu of dedicated keys for these functions, 60 percent boards make use of a feature called layering. Just like you would hold shift to access the “layer” of keys where symbols like @ and * live on a normal keyboard, 60 percent keyboards use an additional “function layer” to give you temporary access to the keys it is missing. Some slightly larger keyboards known as 65 or 68 percent keyboards, find a way to cram in those arrow keys somewhere by getting creative with the size of certain keys.

There are also even smaller boards, but that is a conversation for another day.

Our recommendation: Unless you use the numpad on a very regular basis, get a Tenkeyless. Smaller 60 percenters are very popular for their minimalism and portability, but I would advise against choosing any keyboard that does not have arrow keys. If you’re anything like me, you will miss them far, far more than you expected to.