Spend any amount of time around the keyboard-obsessed parts of the internet and You’ll Be Able To inevitably hear the Satisfied Hacker Keyboard Professional 2 mentioned.
It Can Be a piece of hardware that is almost specifically designed to appeal to an enthusiast area of interest. Its so-known as ‘60% form-issue’ implies that it would not characteristic a num pad, arrow keys, or perhaps a Perform row. Even the keys it does have are positioned like no other keyboard we’ve got ever viewed, with a ‘Keep An Eye On’ key Where the ‘Caps lock’ key must be, and a backspace key sitting Where you’d in any other case find a backslash key.
In different phrases, It’s a keyboard which is Happy to tweak and alter the keyboard layout that the remainder of the world has used unquestioningly since the late ’80s.
The $225 (£260, around AU$290) HHKB Pro 2 would not care Should You’ve spent five, ten, and even Twenty Years increase muscle reminiscence that works a certain method. It has religion in its own means of doing issues, and you’ve got to respect its daring selections.
The Fact That It’s acquired its personal manner of doing issues is one thing, However whether or not You’ll Be Able To Want To relearn use a keyboard is any other factor fully, and we’re not definite that the trouble might be price it for someone rather then the most hardcore of keyboard enthusiasts.
But prior to we get into the main points, let’s take a better look at the keyboard.
Design and structure
The HHKB Professional 2 is a tiny piece of equipment. Despite Using fullsize keys It Is got a footprint that is equivalent in dimension then the keyboard on a Thirteen-inch MacBook Professional. The Secret Is what number of keys It Is shed to get that small.
Whereas your standard MacBook Professional keyboard comes packing a full Perform row from F1 to F12, the HHKB Professional 2 dispenses with this solely. Whereas the Mac keyboard has a good quartet of arrow keys in the bottom proper hand nook, this keyboard has you use a Function key to reach them – you almost get the impression the designers concept the delivered keys would wreck its symmetry.
All The keys that you’d wish to function a modern laptop are still there, But You Can want to use the Perform button to get admission to most of them. Fn plus 1 thru Zero will get you F1 to F10, and different mixtures will access different keys such as ‘Residence’ or ‘Scroll Lock’.
Regardless Of the sheer amount of different issues each key can do, the keyboard as an entire appears to be like sleekly designed, with lovely textured keycaps which have their secondary capabilities printed on the aspect in a colour that is just a color darker than the matt grey plastic they are printed on.
The Perform keys take a little bit getting used to, however the first time you employ the keyboard your largest difficulty will probably be just how another way the whole thing is placed. Where commonplace keyboards have a caps lock key, the HHKB Pro 2 locations its Keep An Eye On key, and Where you’d usually discover a backslash You’ll discover a backspace.
The Former trade makes a certain quantity of sense (In Any Case, when USED TO BE the remaining time you intended to hit the caps lock?), But Despite the latter bringing a helpful key closer to our fingers, we could never get totally pleased with it.
It’s unusually disorientating losing this explicit piece of muscle memory, and It Can Be even worse when you are moving to the keyboard from a ecu (aka ‘ISO’) board with this structure’s fats ‘enter’ key. Trust us, you are going to start urgent enter as a substitute of backspace so much.
It Can Be a steep learning curve, but it surely’s no longer an inconceivable one to scale – provided that you do not have to regularly swap to The Use Of a extra traditional keyboard. If You Have the luxury of working from Residence then this might no longer be a topic, However few are going to Need To need to cart their keyboard between each region that they use a computer.
A Set of DIM switches (proper) help you customise the format, whereas a pair of USB ports (left) are useful additions.
With perseverance (and the exclusion of alternative keyboards) You’ll in the end overcome this, But we by no means totally received used to the dearth of arrow keys.
It’s hardly an issue which is distinctive to the HHKB Pro 2, But as a minimum with a board like the Pok3r the arrow keys had been accessed via a nice neat triangle of shortcut keys similar to the WASD mixture most avid gamers shall be conversant in.
With the HHKB Pro 2, through comparability, you’re The Usage Of A Collection of arrow keys which can be split throughout three different rows on the keyboard (on the ‘/’, ‘;’, ”’ and ‘[‘ keys).
The Usage Of the arrow keys finally ends up feeling awkward even when you’re simply keeping down two keys, and your fingers will contort further as you combat to press more difficult combinations. Need To quickly highlight that last word you wrote (on macOS)? You’ll Be Able To want to dangle Fn, Shift and Alt before urgent the semi-colon key.
Put Out Of Your Mind trying to do any advanced spreadsheet work on this keyboard.
Minimalism is one factor, But eliminating keys which might be so elementary to the functionality of a keyboard is some other thing fully.
That You Can customize the positioning of the keys to a small extent The Usage Of a collection of switches which can be hidden inside the Top of the keyboard. These handle capabilities like swapping the Alt and Choice keys if you are Using the board with a Mac, or transferring the site of the Perform key, However we by no means found that they overcame the basic considerations we had with the structure.
Efficiency
Quibbles about layout aside, the Chuffed Hacker Keyboard Professional 2 is a lovely-feeling board to kind on.
Depending for your familiarity with mechanical keyboards you can also or may not be conversant in ‘Topre’ switches, which utilise a design which is kind of like a halfway point between rubber dome switches an conventional mechanical switches (most famously produced via Cherry).
Debates about the categorization of Topre switches aside (Trust us, that is one a part of the web you are highest off avoiding), You’ll typically find that at their very best they feel the same as weighted piano keys, albeit ones that are accompanied by way of a satisfying ‘thock’ sound as they backside out.
The HHKB Pro certainly has this trademark really feel, But for our cash we as regards to choose the feel supplied by the Topre Realforce line of boards with their backplate-established switches (as opposed to the case-hooked up ones discovered on the HHKB). The Realforce has a shade extra solidity to it, whereas the HHKB feels love it has extra flex.
It Is a distinction few are likely to care about outside of the fanatic community, However when you’ve committed to spending as a lot money on a board as these price, It Is one in an effort to unquestionably matter to you.
Verdict
The Chuffed Hacker Keyboard Professional 2 has a cult standing for a reason. Its mixture of sleek design, Topre switches, and bizarre layout seem virtually particularly designed to enchantment to the more or less one who would not bat an eyelid at spending over $200 on a keyboard.
When You’ve heard about it on the grapevine, then there’s little or no that we would be able to say to dissuade you In The Event You’ve bought your coronary heart set on it. We get it, It Is pretty and compact, It’s beautifully symmetrical, and the design of the keycaps has the more or less muted coloration palette that We Will absolutely see the attraction of.
However after The Usage Of the keyboard for a long time frame, we’re simply not certain that the benefits of its compact structure outweigh the costs. We Are Able To get in the back of the lack of a caps lock key, However does the backspace key actually benefit from being a row lower when It Is nonetheless too a ways away for you to hit without leaving the house row?
And That’s with out citing wanting to make use of a Fn key to get right of entry to the arrow keys.
The HHKB Professional 2 is a fun exercise in questioning centered wisdom. After All, the modern keyboard structure hasn’t changed in the perfect a part of three decades. But we might argue that the Happy Hacker Keyboard goes too some distance to problem the status quo.
It’s a fun novelty for the keyboard fan that wishes to take a look at something new, but if you wish to have a software with which to complete a day’s work then there is little flawed with sticking to one thing which is somewhat extra traditional.
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