No further discussion -- I am staying with a Thinkpad keyboard.
I have been a very happy user of my two SK-8845 keyboards (one at my office, one at home) since I bought them, in 2018 and 2021 respectively. What are they, mind you?
)
The beautiful keyboard every Thinkpad owner knows and loves. And although I no longer use my X230 laptop that was my workhorse for several years, my fingers are spoiled.
So, both shift keys of my home keyboard have been getting flaky, and I am basically sure it’s a failure in the controller, as it does not feel to be physical. It’s time to revisit that seven year old post where I found the SK-8845.
This time, I decided to try my luck with something different. As a Emacs user, everybody knows we ought to be happy with more and more keys. In fact, I suppose many international people are now familiar with El Eternauta, true? we Emacs users would be the natural ambassadors to deal with the hand species:
So… it kind-of sort-of made sense, when I saw a Toshiba-IBM keyboard being sold for quite cheap (MX$400, just over US$20) to try my luck with it:
This is quite an odd piece of hardware, built in 2013 according to its label. At first I was unsure whether to buy it because of the weird interface it had, but the vendor replied they would ship a (very long!) USB cable with it, so…
As expected, connecting it to Linux led to a swift, errorless recognition:
Within minutes of receiving the hardware, I had it hooked up and started looking at the events it generated However… the romance soon started to wane. Some of the reasons:
- We cannot forget it is a
Piece of ShitPoint Of Sale keyboard. It is not intended to be a creative interface. So, the keys are ~75% the size of regular keys. My fingers have a hard time getting used to it, I keep hitting wrong keys. I know “I am holding it wrong” and my muscle memory can be retrained (and I was very happy when I had the tiny 9” Acer Aspire One)… but still, it is not pleasant. - I exclusively use keyboards with a trackpad (as those found in most laptops) because I found that constantly moving my hand to the mouse and back produced me back ache. Within an hour of typing in this keyboard, the old back ache I was happy not to ever have again came back to me.
-
The pointer device has a left and a right button, but neither middle nor scroll buttons. I could generate middle clicks by setting
middle emulation enabled, but the buttons are separated — it requires clicking with both thumbs, which is unelegant, to say the least.I remapped some of the spare keys to be mouse buttons 1–5, and it worked for middle click, but not for scroll events. Maybe I could tweak it a bit more… but I didn’t in the end.
Anyway… I’m returning it 🙁 I found an SK-8845 for sale in China for just MX$1814 (~US$90), and jumped for it… They are getting scarce! Nowadays it’s getting more common (and cheaper) to find the newer style Thinkpad keyboards, but without a trackpad 🙁 I don’t think I should stockpile on keyboards, but… no, I’m not doing that 😉
Anyway, so I’m sticking to a Thinkpad keyboard, third in a row.