happy hacking redux
Geek
It was with great pleasure that I finally plugged in my new Happy Hacking keyboard. This is the keyboard of the gods. A positive key action, <ctrl> in the right place, a generously proportioned space bar and no gratuitous keys. The thing occupies about half the space on my desk that a normal keyboard would and about 2/3 the size of the old Apple keyboard that it replaces. I have a Lite 2 USB model, which has has two USB ports, so I am not losing anything from switching.
And it is black. Rock!
The timing could not have been better, I was in flow for about nine and a half hours straight today and had I used the Apple keyboard for that amount of time, I would have been in an equivalent amount of pain.
It was surprising how quickly I got back into it. I used an earlier model at work for four years (which my boss very nicely paid for) and so gave it up when I left at the start of last year to finish my study. Still, my fingers were back, completely at home after only about twenty minutes of email, IM and code. It was really freaky, but I was typing at it as if nary a month had passed since I stopped using the old one, without even being aware of it. I soon realised I was pulling the old fn combos for things like the overloaded arrow keys before remembering to do so, without having to think about doing it. The new model has dedicated arrow keys, so I guess I have some unlearning to do.
Now I need to resume the jihad against those applications on my desktop that do not use Emacs key bindings for editing and cursor movement. Yes Evolution, I am looking at you.
Comments
I want to get one of these(http://www.pfu.fujitsu.com/en/hhkeyboard/hhkbpro/black.html) just to make every other geek feel a little jelous. I’d love to purge the capslock key but I don't know about moving the contorl key. While i'm at it i might as well shift to dvorak. It would be cool if you could rewire the circuit board so that it gave a dvorak response when plugged into qwerty software. That way you could just plug and play into to any machine you need to work on. (I'm fairly certain this would be next to impossible considering the way key strokes are detected using that matrix system)
Posted by: matty on June 21, 2005 02:39 PM
Sorry about that link, this may work better though the whole site is down for me at the moment. http://www.pfu.fujitsu.com/en/hhkeyboard/hhkbpro/black.html
I couldn't see that there were two different keyboards in that picture on my brothers crappy secondary monitor. I'm fairly set on getting the hhkbpro black (the top one with the blank keys).
Posted by: matty on June 21, 2005 04:07 PM
Another believer! Good man! I wonder how much the Pro's key action differs from the Lite-2's and why they left the arrow keys off? Maybe you should get one so I can find out. :D
The placement of the control key is pretty useful for people use Emacs a lot, which I do. Even if you just use it for normal application keyboard accelerators, it is worth it. One thing I like about Gnome for a desktop is it can remap this kind of thing on a per-user basis. So on normal keyboards I can still have the Ctrl key in a useful place and not freak people out who also use the same computer.
I think I remember the hardcore, old-school UNIX workstation keyboards being fully programmable. Too bad they do not seem to exist anymore, they could have done that dvorak trick pretty easily (assuming they had some sort of PROM to store the layout sans-power).
Posted by: Mike on June 21, 2005 06:20 PM
I've had a HHK Lite II for quite a while now, and my only complaint is that my girlfriend hates it.
But what would she know, she doesn't skydive either (though I am working on that - she's getting an AFF course for her birthday ;)
It really does kick ass, though its lack of built-in backspace is suboptimal out of the box. I'll be getting the blank-keyed Pro next time I remember it exists (which I do, about once every couple of months) and my local dealer has them in stock (they tend to fly off the shelves for some reason).
Yay Mike's new keyboard yay.
Posted by: Joel on June 21, 2005 06:29 PM
I showed my brother and he was like 'meh' but I fully want one now. I run OSX and dabble in *nix (mainly unix) a little, but I'm a fairly devoted keyboard user, I feel dirty touching the mouse. The only thing I don't like about the blank board is that it only has one function key. However, I think I'll like having the control key where it is, at the moment on my iBook I'm running out of hotkeys that I like because the operator keys aren't as well spread.
anyway, if/when I get one I'll let you know and we can compare notes :D
Posted by: matty on June 21, 2005 08:13 PM
Joel: What on earth is Em's beef with it?
I wonder about the rationale with the delete key. Sun Type-3's used to have delete rather than backspace, and Apples still do (but I have never noticed it being a problem, is it actually a backspace?). There does not seem to be an Emacs equivalent to C-d for backspace, so I will have to switch the delete key to a backspace, I guess.
Matty: Yeah, ignore your brother, what does he know? Go on, get one, you know want to... :)
Posted by: Mike on June 22, 2005 12:33 AM
yeah, my ibook has a key labelled delete to the right of the =/+ key. it acts like a backspace when pressed and acts like a delete when pressed with the function button. Except in the unix shell/terminal where it acts as a backspace but inserts a ~ when you're holding delete. you need to crtl+shift+D to forwards delete there.
More bizarre, apple have a return key which acts like an enter key, and a separate enter key (to the left of the arrows) which does exactly the same thing 99% of the time. However, holding Fn+return makes the return key act as an enter key. It's really weird, I don't know why they didn't put something more useful there than the second enter key (i remapped it to be a secondary function key)
Posted by: matty on June 22, 2005 01:03 AM
Heh. Apple does as Apple wants. I am sure there is some obsure Apple human-interface guideline somewhere covering this sort of thing.
Not that they bother adhering to such things any more...
Posted by: Mike on June 22, 2005 06:44 PM
Just purchasing a second HHKL2, to have it both at home and at the office. The wife even lives with the oddly positioned backspace/ctrl.
One tip, is that it's easy to pry off the keys, and therefore switch Alt and diamond to match your dip setting.
My keyboard nirvana would be the Pro's keys, on a Lite2 layout, but modified so that Crtl and Fn were dip-switch-swapable (and physically swappable), backspace was in the upper right, and the function keys were a row of real, if half-height, full-width, keys. Oh, the final touch would be the option of pseudo-emacs key mappings with the Fn key, e.g. Fn-n is cursor-down.
Posted by: James on June 30, 2005 06:24 AM
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