.comment: The Search for a Truly Great Keyboard

By: Dennis E. Powell
Wednesday, February 7, 2001 09:32:02 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3005/1/

The Weak Link

Computer makers, and makers of computer upgrades, go to a lot of trouble to produce very high quality monitors, some really nifty trackballs (which would be even better if they'd bother to produce Linux-specific drivers; for instance, my Kensington Expert Mouse would be a lot cooler if its programmable buttons were programmable under Linux), and all sorts of other wonderful stuff. But the area that's largely left behind is the one most in need of attention, because it is the one thing with which we all must deal: The keyboard.

And that's a shame. Keyboards are probably replaced more frequently than any other piece of hardware. They get full of all kinds of crud and corruption -- it takes a strong stomach, sometimes, do disassemble and clean one of the things -- and none is really happy for long if swimming in Coca Cola or coffee. No, those keyboard condom things aren't the answer -- they destroy the sensation. Face it: Keyboard replacement is something that happens and is going to happen. And face, too, the fact that the aftermarket keyboard supply is just terrible, unless you want to go hunting in extraobvious places. The standard replacement keyboard at local clone shops or computer stores is so flimsy that you can grab each end and by applying just a little torsional force reduce it to shards of flimsy plastic usually found elsewhere only in packaging materials. (Yes, there are now weirdly-shaped keyboards, and "Internet" keyboards; a few years ago there was a thing that looked like a mouse or a flight simulator throttle quadrant that had a few buttons, the idea being that by properly chording the buttons you could do everything you could do with a regular keyboard. All of these are [and were] relatively expensive, gimmicky, and in the final analysis beside the point.)

In the early days, keyboards were solid pieces of machinery. The original IBM-PC keyboard was a heavy and serious thing, albeit with just 84 keys. I have one in the other room, awaiting discovery of a cable that will attach it to a machine that wants an AT keyboard. You can find IBM PC-ATs all over the place, but one with its original keyboard will bring three times the price, because they keyboards themselves are so good that people have lovingly maintained them and have kept them when upgrading their other hardware. The IBM mainframe keyboards were even better -- also in the other room I have a huge and wonderful keyboard for an IBM terminal. This thing has all kinds of special-purpose keys, each sitting atop a switch that appears designed to survive nuclear attack. This Mighty Wurlitzer of a keyboard, alas, has defied all efforts to hook it up to a plain old PC.

I even have an extended keyboard, XT only, sad to say, that was made by Key Tronics, that is rock-solid (though the clickless keys are as squishy and unsatisfying as any in the genre) and that, according to the box, once cost someone more than $400.

My idea of a perfect keyboard is one that feels and sounds like that of an IBM Selectric typewriter. (For newcomers, a typewriter was a thing that connected keyboard directly to paper, and all you got out of it was characters on paper. They were very popular a couple of decades ago.) The Selectric vibrated and shook with what must have been about a 20-horsepower motor. Then, when you hit one of the keys, there was a satisfying THWACK as all of its pent-up fury was released in a powerful display of ink reaching paper. I want, but shall never have, a computer keyboard that so obviously displays immense force. I have to settle for clickiness, that phenomenon which leaves no doubt as to whether the key has been pressed.

For a decade, the clicky keyboard by which all others were measured was the Northgate Omnikey. It was made by a company, Northgate, that built clones in the era before the great hardware shakeout, when companies like Everex did battle with the upstarts Dell and Gateway. The Northgate Omnikey was so popular that the company sold it separately, and when the company went under the major concern was what would happen to the keyboard business. We could live without Northgate computers, but not without Northgate keyboards.

The Omnikey had the greatest feel imaginable. It also had, in its classic form, function keys to the left of the main keyboard in two vertical rows, as The Almighty intended. (A later version, the Omnikey Ultra, also had them across the top, but these were programmable via software, and merely aped the other function keys if you hadn't changed them.) Indeed, the Omnikey was so prestigious that there was a special configuration option for it in XF86Setup.

But Northgate is gone, and its keyboards mostly so. From time to time some company will happen upon a cache of them, and they get sold quickly. Those who have Omnikeys maintain them very carefully, disassembling and cleaning them from time to time. (Tip: If you can find one of those little cloth netting drawstring bags that women and very strange men use to launder their nylons, you can put your keycaps in one and put the bag in the top rack of a dishwasher to restore them to just-like-new freshness; take them out before the dry cycle begins.) Still, keyboards wear out, and the switch most likely to cease to function first is one you use most often -- the one under the spacebar, say, or the Enter key. Soon, Northgate keyboards will be too rare and valuable to use.

I've been through three Omnikeys in the last dozen years. My last one gave up the ghost a few months ago. There is no supplier that I can find of new ones.

Since that time, I've been auditioning keyboards. As I write this I'm literally surrounded by keyboards, from old and solid ones that began life on an ancient Wang 286 (the most beautifully built PC I've ever seen, by the way) and an old NEC desktop, various broken Omnikeys (for click and springiness comparison), and a selection of others new and old; I'll write, though, mostly about the new ones.

Bleak, But Not Hopeless

One thing I'd hoped to avoid was keyboards with Windows keys. It's bad enough having to deal with Wintrash in the form of lousy modems and braindead printers. I'll not be constantly reminded that Windows users are apparently incapable of hitting Ctrl-Esc at the same time.

Fortunately there is in my town a fellow who deals in what I suppose the unenlightened would call computer junk. If you really must find a 40-meg MFM drive, he's the guy to see. (No, I won't tell you his name, no matter how sorry your story. He's mine. Find your own.) He is also my supplier of IBM PS/2 keyboards (note to the newbies: PS/2 signifies a line of IBM computers, not an over-hyped and under-produced Sony game console).

A visit to him and the relinquishment of $30 got me a nicely boxed PS/2 keyboard. It's not as solid as the original PC-AT keyboard, but it's sturdier than just about anything else. The keyes have a satisfying click, and the springs are about twice as stiff as the ones on my Omnikeys. The tops of the keycaps are smaller, too, like truncated pyramids, making it less likely that you'll hit one key while aiming for a different one.

The bad news is that the function keys are splayed across the top, instead of living in useful fashion on the left, making combinations such as Alt-F2 as much of a contortion as the Ctrl-Esc that has apparently bedeviled the Windows crowd. And I did have to poke around my miscellaneous hardware drawer for half an hour in search of a PS/2 to AT keyboard plug adapter (after which I gave up and bought one, after which within a day I found two that I already had).

This is turned out to be the baseline keyboard: I would use it until I found something better.

An Unhappy Non-Hacker

At last week's LinuxWorld, the purveyors of the "Happy Hacking" keyboard had set up a small booth, and I dropped by and bought one.

There are two versions: The original, which costs $120 or more and which works on a variety of platforms via different cables, and the "Lite" version, which cost me $50 and which comes with a PS/2 plug. (As I mentioned, I have PS/2-to-AT adapters, and in any event it would be a hell of an adapter that cost $70!)

The neat thing about the Happy Hacking keyboard is that it is irredeemably cute. It is tiny, yet the keys are normal size. How do they do it? The keys go right up to the edge of the thing, like early MacIntosh keyboards or the old Poquet PC. And there aren't enough of them. The Happy Hacking keyboard has but 60 keys. And two of those are marked with a diamond, about which more in a minute.

So how to they pretend to have a full-function keyboard with, effectively, 58 keys? Ah! Notebook computers have grudgingly endured the Fn key for years now. This is yet another meta key, that in combination with other keys changes the meaning of those other keys. Thus one gets access to such optional extras as arrow keys only by pressing the Fn key and holding it while striking the key you wanted in the first place, which spends most of its life as another key.

There are four DIP switches behind a little cover on the back of the Happy Hacking keyboard. These let you alter the functions of some keys. The first lets you decide whether the Delete key is a delete key or a backspace key. (The other function becomes Fn+Delete.) The second switch, if turned on, gives the Tab key new meaning: Fn+Tab=CapsLock. The third switch (and here the documentation becomes a little tough) lets you decide whether, depending on the position of switch four, the left Alt key means Alt or MUEHKAN or Fn, the left Diamond key means MUHENKAN, Alt, Windows, or Fn, the right Diamond key is HENKAN, Alt, or Windows, and the right Alt key is Alt, HENKAN, or Windows. The defaults are for Delete to be delete, Tab to be just tab, both Alts to be alt, and the left and right Diamonds to be MUHENKAN and HENKAN respectively, and I had no idea in the world what those two words mean. I phoned PFU America, Inc., and asked. I was told that they are useful only to those who need a Japanese language keyboard. This means that the Happy Hacking keyboard will provide multiple Alt, Windows, and/or Fn keys, but either Backspace or Delete has to be reached by use of a meta key. When you have only 60 keys to spend, you need to be careful how you spend them.

The key action is distinctly non-clicky (though the original, expensive version is even mushier), and would be a delight to those who favor a perfectly silent keyboard. Here, it was another mark against it. Because it is so small, at about 11 1/2 by 4 3/4 inches, it might seem a good alternative for those who do not like the keyboards on their portable machines. Problem is, most portables offer more key functions more readily accessed than does the Happy Hacking keyboard, which might nevertheless be useful in this way if you have, say, a Toshiba Libretto, which has the worst keyboard in the world.

All of which makes me very sad, because the people involved with the product are really nice. I'd love to see them succeed. If it were more programmable and the programming choices were a little broader, they might.

Which brings up another issue worthy of mention. One needs to be careful to avoid getting too wacky with keyboard design or customization. There are keyboard standards and, like them or not, they enable the user to type into one machine pretty much the same way he or she would type into any other box. It is presumably possible to dig into the code and remap the keyboard to assign just about any character to just about any scancode, then rearrange the keycaps to comply. You could, if you wanted, make your QWERTY keyboard into an ABCDEF keyboard. The result would be miserable to use until you got accustomed to it, after which you'd be of no use on other boxen. (You could even make your own one-way ROT-13 keyboard. You could do a lot of useless things.) This is the chief, maybe only, argument against improvements such as the Dvorak keyboard. Still, a good-hearted hacker might come up with a recipe to make the Happy Hacking keyboard more useful.

I don't think of myself as a hacker (nor does anyone who has seen any code I've written), and this cute little thing did not make me happy.

Speaking of Programmable....

There are tons of really interesting keyboards to be found in the point-of-sale hardware channel. Many of them are built like tanks and cost a lot of money. And their key action typically takes a back seat to their ability to withstand an onslaught of fries and a supersize soft drink. They're usually associated with Macs -- of the Big variety. But there are some that are designed for use by people for whom computing is other than keeping track of lunch hour. Sadly, most of these employ a software layer that ties the user to some flavor of Windows for the programming to be effective. For instance, I've heard the Avant keyboard spoken of in glowing terms -- but a visit to that company's website produces all manner of Windows-centric stuff and relatively little about the keyboard itself. In that their really good version costs close to $200, testing of it for suitability for use with Linux will have to await someone with pockets deeper than mine.

An alternative is the Ortek MCK-142Pro (which, no, is not made by the people who produce the eight-pound vacuum cleaner). It has 142 keys!

The Ortek resembles an OmniKey Ultra, in that it has function keys both to the left of and above the standard alphanumeric keys. But it goes further: in addition to the usual arrow keys, it has four diagonal keys, which move the cursor up or down one line and over one space; in the center of this starburst of arrows is a key labeled "Fast Repeat," which doubles the repeat rate of a key that's held down.

The real standout feature of the Ortek, though, is the double row of programmable function keys across the top of the thing. You can record as many as 320 characters in each one and play them back at will. If you regularly type things such as "CXXFLAGS=' -march=k6' ./configure --prefix=/opt/kde --disable-debug" but don't do it often enough that it will be in your shell's scrollback file, these are very useful. The keyboard has 8k of onboard memory and a lithium battery to keep the programming alive even through a machine shutdown (once the lithium battery dies, you need to power the thing with four AA batteries).

Programming the keys is a simple matter of pressing a key labeled "Select" twice, hitting the key to which you want to save the string, then typing in the text string you want to save. (I'm told that meta key combinations can be saved, but I have not thusfar gotten it to do so.) Press the "Select" key again twice and the string is saved. To invoke the string, press the "Select" key once and then the programmed key (they're labeled PF1-PF24) containing the text string you want. There is a little DOS-based utility that is pretty useful -- it lets you dump the contents of the keyboard to a file, and lets you load it back in, or lets you load it into another Ortek keyboard elsewhere. If you put it on a bootable DOS floppy, you can boot from there and save your configuration onto the floppy. (Not that it's of any particular use to Linux folk, but in that the program takes the filename as a commandline option, you can throw it into a batch file for specialized functions loaded as particular applications are started.) I haven't yet tried to run it under, say, DOSEMU, and I don't know the data structure of the keyboard files. But if the Ortek keyboard becomes popular, a little Linux app that accomplishes pretty much the same thing oughtn't be too tough.

I got one of these great large keyboards -- they cost about $130 -- and am using it to type this. The keys are clicky, but the springs aren't as powerful as the ones on the IBM keyboard, giving a sense of cheapness that probably is undeserved -- it feels almost exactly like a Northgate, though it's not as heavy as one. The nonslip pads on the bottom are very sticky, though, which makes up for the lack of weight. The web page for the Ortek says it comes with a regular DIN keyboard plug and an 8.5-foot cord, both of which claims are erroneous -- the cord is a 3.5-foot thing with a PS/2 plug at the end; if you call and holler, they'll send you an extension (at least until they get their web page fixed). The keyboard comes with one of those plastic templates such as used to be shipped with high-end applications; this one fits over the PF keys and lets you write in (if your writing is extremely small) what the keys have been programmed to accomplish. There is a similar built-in plastic insert above the top row of regular function keys, leading to the sense that these, too, can be programmed, but if they can, the documentation is silent about it.

While I'm not shouting in the streets about the Ortek keyboard, I'm not displeased with it, either. It'll become the new standard here.

Still....

The Ortek's key layout is very close to that of the IBM terminal "Mighty Wurlitzer" -- so close, in fact, that I'm inspired to do a little hardware hacking. (Yeah, yeah, when you hack code you can accomplish things and you can risk screwing up stuff on your hard drive, but hardware hacking can burn your house down. Real men have soldering irons.) I may need to try to cook up a PC cable for the big IBM keyboard and see if I can get it to work. The "Record" and "Play" buttons on it suddenly make sense.

If I pull it off, I'll let you know. If you never hear from me again, it didn't work out as planned -- in which case the Ortek is the best bet.