November 2007 Archives

Well, I know that nobody really cares about my keyboard rantings, but I might as well write a tiny little bit in case someone cares.

I used two Happy Hacker Pro 2's, one at home and one at work, for a good six months. In the past I've tried so many other keyboards, but in the end, it's back to the MS Natural Elite for me (yes the one with the annoying diamond arrow layout).

While the HHKPro2's are fine keyboards indeed, after using them for a while, I started to miss having F-keys, and dedicated arrow keys, and a dedicate PgUp/PgDown block. My muscle memory remembers all the equivalent vim shortcuts, but alas, vim-style isn't available in most apps. And it's not like emacs keybindings work everywhere either, even in Linux. After a while, I decided that it was a good trade off to give up a little bit of desktop real estate in order to have dedicated keys that I didn't have to remember special key combinations for.

I also realized that while the feel of the HHK is very nice, all I really care about are "light" keys. The MS Natural Elite (not the new 4000) has very light keys, so it's good enough for me.

I sold one my of HHK's, but I'll keep the other as a collector's item. I've also re-purchased a couple Natural Elites, one for work and one at home. That cost me less than half of one of the HHK's :-/

Not sure there's much more to write in this blog. I think my search is definitely over for a while. Maybe I'll chime in again when I see some major announcement of a new keyboard.

But that's it, for me, the MS Natural Elite's are better than: IBM Model M, Kinesis Contoured Keyboard, HHK Lites and Pro 2's, MS Natural 4000, Kinesis Maxim, The IceKey, the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, Belkin Ergoboard and Ergoboard Pro, The Tactile Pro, The CVT Avant Prime, and Keytronic elite series.