As a long time vim user I didn’t have as much trouble as I feared for the arrows: just hold my left thumb on mod while using hjkl. (This isn’t quite the native mapping that comes with the keyboard though.)
I mapped mod- and the four right edge keys to home, page up, page down, and end. These were familiar to me from an earlier split keyboard I used. (Goldtouch maybe? Or Kinesis freestyle?)
For function keys, Mod+2 is as easy as fn+F2 on a laptop and not much to remember/learn vs just a raw F2. But I have to admit that some of the shift-alt-Fkey combinations in IntelliJ are even harder to remember and type with an extra mod required.
Probably the thing that really got me was the default keymap requiring mod for escape. So I remapped the corner key to escape, (or backtick with mod) and I have mod-Tab to type tilde. It works, but when going back and forth to the laptop keyboard this is the one that throws me. Also I wish I could teach my Macbook keyboard to have an arrow key layer because I feel like command or caps lock plus hjkl would feel so much better than the tiny inverted T half keys on my laptop.
I mapped mod- and the four right edge keys to home, page up, page down, and end. These were familiar to me from an earlier split keyboard I used. (Goldtouch maybe? Or Kinesis freestyle?)
For function keys, Mod+2 is as easy as fn+F2 on a laptop and not much to remember/learn vs just a raw F2. But I have to admit that some of the shift-alt-Fkey combinations in IntelliJ are even harder to remember and type with an extra mod required.
Probably the thing that really got me was the default keymap requiring mod for escape. So I remapped the corner key to escape, (or backtick with mod) and I have mod-Tab to type tilde. It works, but when going back and forth to the laptop keyboard this is the one that throws me. Also I wish I could teach my Macbook keyboard to have an arrow key layer because I feel like command or caps lock plus hjkl would feel so much better than the tiny inverted T half keys on my laptop.