We're all Happy Hackers

Sep 02, 1999, 17:08 (36 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Dave Whitinger)

We're all Happy Hackers

Dave Whitinger reviews the Happy Hacker Keyboard.

Reviewer	Dave Whitinger
Product	Happy Hacker Keyboard
Maker	PFU America
Summary	An alternative keyboard, intended to be diminutive in size and increase productivity.

I spend my entire day at my desk, typing away. My computer is my office, my window to the outside world. I spend 12 hours a day looking at the world through the glass of my 17 inch monitor.

My position at Linux Today requires me to do a lot of typing. So much, in fact, that I probably hit the keys no less than 5 million times per day. I work very hard to improve my productivity every day, and the best way to add time to my day is to increase my typing speed.

Enter the Happy Hacker Keyboard. PFU America contacted me some time ago. It seems that they had been told how serious I am about my typing, and wanted me to give their keyboard a try. I received it in the mail in early August, and spent the entire month using it.

My initial reaction was, "Whoa!!! Look at the size of that keyboard!". It is tiny. Very tiny.

Now, they sent me two different models: The Happy Hacker Keyboard, and the Happy Hacker Keyboard Lite. The former sells for twice as much as the latter. As I write this review, I'll try to explain the differences (as I saw them) between these two model. To avoid confusion, understand that I will refer to the regular Happy Hacker Keyboard as the "HHK", and the lite version as "HHK Lite".

Both keyboards are fairly configurable. They have dip switches on the bottom that you can flip to change the code that certain keys send to the computer.

Neither have a caps lock key, instead it has been replaced by the control key. To the left and the right of the space bar are Alt keys and Meta keys.

The backspace is called "Delete", and actually sends the delete code (as opposed to the backspace code) by default.

There are no function keys, there is no numeric keypad, no arrow keys, no 'special keys', like PgUp, Home, End, Pause, etc.

In order to reach these special keys, they have included a key called "Fn". By using the Fn key in conjunction with another key, you can send the code you desire. For example, if you want to do PgUp, you'll hit Fn-l. For insert, Fn-\. F1-F12 can be reached with Fn-1 through Fn-=.

The HHK Lite is only intended for i386 machines, while the HHK includes adapters to plug the keyboard into a Sun, Mac, or i386 box.

The dip switches on the back allow you to change the backspace to a delete (or vice versa), and change the meta and alt keys around. While both models feature these dip switches, surprisingly, the HHK Lite offers more configuration options than the full HHK.

No problem, however, because I am using this keyboard with Linux. Being the Happy Hacker that I am, I immediately took to do some customizations of my keyboard.

The first order of business was to load up xev(1) and get the keycodes for each of these keys. I determined the left Alt and Meta, right Alt and Meta, and the Backspace key.

I then created a file called .Xmodmap in my home directory, and entered the following lines:

keycode 113 = Delete
keycode 131 = Alt_R

This allows my left Meta key to be an Alt key, and my right meta key to be a delete button. As I set the dip switches to make my Backspace key really be a backspace key, hitting Fn-` was unacceptable to access the true delete. Now, when in E-Mail, I can delete the character in front of my cursor with the right meta key. (I had to restart X to make these changes take effect.)

Now that this business is finished, it's time to start playing around. I use Afterstep as my window manager, and use the Ctrl-arrow key combinations to switch desktops. I now found, however, that instead of a 2-key combinations, I am now required to do a 3-key combination. Ctrl-Fn-Arrow. This significantly slowed my desktop switching, which I have to do about once every 15 seconds. My goal is to reconfigure my Afterstep to have Ctrl-HJKL be my arrows, so that I can use vi-like keys to maneuver around. That's a later step, though, as for the time being I can live with Ctrl-Fn-Arrow.

When I post a story, I do a lot of "Home" and "End" keystrokes. This is now a little more tedious, as Home is now Fn-K and End is now Fn-,.

In vi (my preferred text editor), I have found a whole new world of efficiency. The keys are laid out in a manner that really does increase my productivity for writing articles (such as this one). My fingers glide easily across the keyboard with comfort, providing few typos.

The escape key is located where the back-tick (`) is normally located, i.e., to the left of the 1. This makes it very easy to switch from insert mode to command mode. My hands generally do not have to move at all when I am typing with this keyboard.

PFU has chosen to make the HHK keys feel different than the HHK Lite. I'm from the camp of click-click-click keys. I want my neighbors to know that I am typing at my keyboard. I would pay good money for a collection of old IBM PS/2 keyboards in order to obtain that click that they are famous for.

The HHK Lite is what some refer to as a "mushroom key". This means that the keyboard does not provide a click for each key pressed, but rather it sort of squishes down. The downside to this is that you do not get that sonic report from the keyboard, confirming that your key has been pressed. After years of training my brain to listen for these clicks, my fingers were now confused. I can imagine my fingers thinking to themselves, "Now, I know that I hit that key, but it never did verbally confirm that I hit it." Somehow this is causing my brain to slow down the typing, as my fingers have to retrain themselves to not require the return click from the key.

The HHK, on the other hand, while also largely silent on the report, features more of a straight-forward keystroke. When you press a key, you feel the key being hit. For this reason alone, I prefer the HHK over the HHK Lite.

These days, it's almost impossible to buy a brand-new keyboard without the stupid Microsoft Windows buttons. The HHK and HHK Lite are, of course, void of any Microsoft keys.

These keyboards have increased my productivity, for sure, and my desktop is doubled since I removed my previous (enormous) keyboard. After using it for 30 days, I have decided that I will continue using it for the indefinite future.