Recently (About 2 months ago) I purchased a HHKB Studio (black). Now they also have snow color available and it looks very cool, but I guess I would still get the black one anyways. If you know me well you might know that I have been using HHKB since 2022. My first ever HHKB is a Professional Hybrid Type-S. It’s quite dirty and has some yellow stains on it, but it’s still as responsive as the first day I got it.
That being said, I also admire keyboards with trackpoints like those on ThinkPads. There are such keyboards that are cheaper than HHKB Studio, but the HHKB’s build quality and key layout really stood out to me. The new HHKB Studio uses silent linear mechanical switches instead of traditional Topre swtiches. Additionally, they are hot-swappable.
Since I have a ThinkPad X260 which I exclusively use it for streaming priated videos in the living room and I don’t really use the trackpoint, I replaced the original nibble with the X260’s.
One interesting story I had with the HHKB Studio is that in order to use
function keys like F12, I need to press Fn key as prefix. That’s completely
normal and I had to do the same thing on my previous HHKB, but with this
keyboard, I couldn’t use F12 to go to the boot menu (I dual boot btw). This
could be just a design flaw since HHKB Studio has much more complex
features than other HHKBs. The Fn key might not fully initialized during
boot.
The fix is to plug the keyboard into the USB port that has a “BIOS” mark. That way, the keyboard will be initialized first.
Now I’m using the same keymapping on my old HHKB, with some built-in hotkeys
exclusive to the HHKB Studio. For example, I can bind Alt and the arrow keys, so I
don’t have to press Alt + $\leftarrow $ to go backward in browsers.
I am aware that Firefox for Linux has Ctrl + [ / ] which is more handy, but it lacks
some extensions that I use and most importantly, performance that I can see on
chromium browsers (I use Chromium btw).
