![]() ![]() Control replaces Caps Lock on the primary layer.Other than the spacebar, these are the only keys on the bottom row In the bottom row, there is one alt/meta key and one win/super key on each side of the keyboard.As is usually the case with 60% keyboards, there is no function row, navigation cluster, or numpad.To do this, it makes some peculiar deviations from a typical keyboard layout: More accurately, it is actually the fifth: the original Happy Hacking Keyboard, Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite and Lite 2, and Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional all precede the HHKB2.Īs this excellent interview with it’s designer, Eiiti Wada, explains, the goal of the original HHKB and its descendants is to adapt the QWERTY layout and add some ergonomic and utilitarian touches. The HHKB2 takes the 60% ideal further – how do we achieve some of the ergonomic efficiency of alt keyboards while still retaining a compact and portable form factor? The LayoutĪs the name suggests, the HHKB2 is the second in a line of Happy Hacking Keyboards. Some features that are relegated to a secondary function layer in these layouts – the function row, navigation cluster, home/end/delete/insert/pageup/pagedown buttons, and the numpad. Among these have been the ascent of so-called 60% keyboards, which seek to shrink the overall size of keyboards without compromising functionality. While alternative keyboard formats such as Dvorak and Colemak have been around since the 1930s, the last two decades have seen an influx of QWERTY based alt formats that try to promote some kind of efficiency without forsaking the prototypical keyboard layout on which most typists learn to type. A few buttons have come and gone (goodbye SUPER and META, hello WIN and ALT/OPTION), but you can hand a standard keyboard to most any time traveller from the 70s and they would largely understand what is going on. By and large, keyboards from the early days of computers look very much like the keyboards of today (excepting the radical ergonomic designs that come around every now and then). A yet smaller population will gravitate towards typist-focused mechanical keyboards, the ones that use Cherry MX-type switches.įor all of the engineering innovation that has infused keyboard technology over the past 150 years (dating back to 1873, when Christopher Latham Sholes invented the QWERTY keyboard, having previously experimented with a number of other layouts), not much design innovation has accompanied it, especially in the last thirty years. Others will think of gaming keyboards that have such features as macro keys and wild RGB backlighting. A few people will think of ergonomic keyboards that adopt strange shapes in the name of comfort. When most people first think of a keyboard, they probably think of the one attached to their laptop, or perhaps the one that came included with their desktop. ![]() ![]() The Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2 (HHKB2) is not a keyboard for most people, but for 1% of people, it is the solution to a problem that most people don’t even know exists. Implied in the term is an excess of effort for the associated reward – if only 1% of people can appreciate what you’ve built, why build it at all? 1% solutions solve a problem that only 1% of the population has. There’s a term in engineering called a “1% Solution”. ![]()
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