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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

A side comment, as it's the first time I see the "ultimate hacking keyboard":

Whenever I see a keyboard with an "Fn" key, I sigh. This means that the designer of the keyboard thought he knows better which functions I need and took valuable space in the modifier row for a key which I will probably never use. Media control functions? Come on.

Most keyboards that have an "Fn" key do not allow you to remap it in any way and invent new, impressively useless functions for it, often involving holding it for a second or longer to get to some functionality (the mind boggles).

I couldn't understand from the description if the "Fn" key is fully configurable — I sincerely hope it is, because otherwise I will never want to use this keyboard.

Otherwise this seems like a really nice design.

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I actually use media control keys very often when playing music on my laptop, much much quicker than going into an app first.

I actually like the how OS X by default uses the fn functionality, and you press fn to access f1, f2 etc.. Except for very few games, I never actually use those keys anyways. And even then I use something like Palua[0] to automatically enable/disable the fn key based on the app that is currently in focus.

[0] http://itunes.apple.com/app/palua/id431494195

You could have set up those media keyboard shortcuts yourself at the software level.

The problem with the Fn key is that it, itself, typically cannot be reassigned.

It is possible to remap pretty much any OS X key with the help of a utility like Karabiner.

Incidentally, if you try to do this with the Caps Lock key on an aluminum Apple keyboard, you will (painfully) discover, that this key has a built-in hardware delay.

Remapping it to Control (as most normal people do) means that some of your control combinations will miss, also under Windows (it's really a hardware thing).

It's my understanding that to remap Caps Lock to Control (nicely that is) on Apple's keyboards that you need to use Seil (closely related to Karabiner, and from the same dev).

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/seil.html.en

The standard keyboard preferences have this option under "modifier keys..." Is this missing some functionality I haven't noticed?

On Apple hardware? Sure, probably. On other hardware on an Apple machine? It depends.

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/faq.html.en

Having to press three keys for a force reload (Ctrl+F5 on Windows/Linux) seems incredibly awkward.

I can't really imagine living without F5, F11 or F12 as a web developer.

For force reload in prefer Ctrl/Cmd-R in the meantime. Although it's more keys to press than F5 I still find it to be more comfortable because I need to move fingers less.

However I agree that software development without function keys would suck (IDE shortcuts, debugger, control, etc.)

OS X key shortcuts are very much biased towards alphabetical keys. F-key usage in standard system shortcuts is a very rare thing. In your particular example, reloading is done with Command+R while force reload is Command-Shift-R. Most OS X shortcuts follow this pattern: they're easier to remember (phonetic association) and usually make for less awkward hand positioning when used.

Because of this, on my MacBook I've mapped FKeys to do global stuff; F1 brings up Spotlight (launcher), F2 shows a Quake-style drop down terminal, and F3 bring up a popover calendar (Fantastical). The only exception is F4, which ive set up to pop open Xcode's "Quick Open" UI.

Small point: the phonetic association of Cmd-R is great for English speakers, but much less meaningful to users who don't know English

On Mac keyboards, F5 doesn't require Fn because it doesn't have a media key alternative. F5 always does F5 whether you push Fn or not. (F6 is the same way.)

Even worse. Many new laptop keyboards have the media control buttons be the default behavior, and require the "Fn" key to access the F keys.

You can almost always swap that in the BIOS or the OS

Worse is when standalone keyboards do this (many bluetooth and "multimedia" keyboards do).

No BIOS to configure and the software they come with don't usually have the option either.

Don't forget the tiny arrow keys (also sometimes home/pgup/pgdn/end) bunched up together - what the hell were those designers smoking? :-)

From the main page: "It's important to note that the above are only the layers of the factory keymap. You can redefine them in any way and create multiple, custom, application-specific keymaps."

I don't notice anywhere in the description which clarifies if the Fn key itself can be changed to, say, ctrl or alt.

I also would avoid this (otherwise nice) keyboard if Fn could not be changed to a standard modifier.

I guess you could make a rule like Fn-* = Ctrl-*. And anyway the plan seems to be making the software Free, so you can hack it anyway.

As the lead developer of the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard I can confirm that the Fn key can be reprogrammed just like any other key.

You can make Backspace emit Ctrl, Enter emit Alt+Tab, or make the Right Shift play back a macro.

Thanks for the clarification! This is very reassuring. I would suggest that you explicitly state this on your web page — as this thread shows, I wasn't the only one being suspicious of the 'Fn' key. We've been burned too many times.

That's great. If I can make Fn work as Ctrl or Alt, then this keyboard would seem to have everything I need. Its design (particularly the split spacebar with extra modifier) nicely solves some of my keyboard annoyances.

I'll keep an eye on its development and availability. Thanks.

This seems like such a massively important feature that I have to ask you, as a keyboard developer, is there any particular obstacle to making a keyboard fully reprogrammed? I feel my productivity on my laptop would be massively improved by a few select changes such as Fn+hjkl as PgUp/PgDn/Home/End, and such, yet virtually no laptop I've seen allows this, so I have to rely on workarounds to fix the sometimes braindead layouts. Is there a hardware-level obstacle to doing this or is it just that the mainstream manufacturers just can't be arsed?

PS: I'm not your target audience (I use my laptop keyboard almost exclusively) but great job so far!

> Whenever I see a keyboard with an "Fn" key, I sigh. This means that the designer of the keyboard thought he knows better which functions I need and took valuable space in the modifier row for a key which I will probably never use.

And what tells you they won't make this key configurable? Nothing.

> Media control functions? Come on.

Most people listen to music, you know. It's certainly not crazy to have them on every keyboard.

The FN key, especially on laptops, is not something the OS has any control over. A few laptops have a bios setting to allow swapping fn and ctrl buttons, but not all of them.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/514781/intercepting-the-f...

The Truly Ergonomic Keyboard (linked elsewhere in the thread) provides a software tool to reconfigure the keyboard's firmware. I don't see how the manufacture couldn't provide something like this to also configure the Fn key combos.

I prefer firmware configuration over software anyway -- it lets you re-use the same keyboard with different computers or when dual booting.

The function key is most often (read: always) implemented in hardware so when you hold the button the chip in the keyboard modifies the raw character code sent over USB.

Unless they explicitly programmed the IC for re onfigurability of FN, it will be the same useless button.

> "Most keyboards that have an "Fn" key do not allow you to remap it in any way…"

I just got the Vortex Poker 3 which lets you remap (and bind to macros) almost anything, and it's working out great so far.

Best i can tell, you can create your own keymaps covering on all of the four "layers" reachable via modifier keys.

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