Hacker News Reader

Comment by ueie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com