I used to think this way as I’ve been able to touch type for a very long time but in total darkness it’s very nice to be able to find a key/orient things.

My samsung laptop has no way to change the backlight from Linux so it stays off. If only there were a way to this in a standardised way (acpi) samsung?

But … sometimes it’s dark

I don’t need to look at the most common keys or the letters; but some of the weirder ones I don’t use often, I might have to actually look at the board for. Having them backlit helps see when it’s dark. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’ve had this ErgoDox for, like, 6 years. It has underlights, but no backlights, but also no home row keys. The entire time I’ve owned it, in the dark I’ve struggled to find the home row, often taking seconds to find my finger placement by feeling the edges of the keyspace. It’s been a constant source of irritation, but it never occurred to me to just buy some home row caps.

Anyway, I was tidying up to office the other day, and found a little packet that came with the keyboard containing home row caps. FML, but with a silver lining, right?

In the process of swapping out those two caps, I completely broke the J switch. So now I’m (temporarily) using a Kinesis Gaming keyboard and learning an object lesson about how utterly miserable row stagger is.

My point is that backlighting would probably have saved me a lot of grief; not as much as home row keys, but still better than nothing.

I need backlit keys for the function keys and the other non-letter keys

Also accents (not in english obviously)

OP is the guy on the left but thinks they’re the guy on the right.