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Comment by jamesfmilne | Hacker News Reader

Jamie Zawinski wrote a fairly critical review of it

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/08/ultimate-hacking-keyboard/

Warning: jwz doesn’t care much for HN, so you will be referred to a NSFW image if you follow the above link. I recommend copying & pasting the URL :-)

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Jamie wasn't looking for a 60% keyboard, yet he purchased the UHK which is a 60% keyboard. That directly resulted in his review. Imagine you want a sedan but buy a truck.

Some other reviews:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/8rnr8l...

http://codingsupply.com/ultimate-hacking-keyboard-review-wor...

http://brettterpstra.com/2018/08/17/i-wrote-a-review-of-the-...

Franky, the UHK has received extremely positive reviews with the exception of Jamie's.

> Warning: jwz doesn’t care much for HN, so you will be referred to a NSFW image if you follow the above link. I recommend copying & pasting the URL :-)

Or use the opportunity to disable the referer header. In Firefox, it's network.http.sendRefererHeader in about:config.

uMatrix also has this feature (works on both FF and Chrome), it can be setup globally and per site/domain.

> network.http.sendRefererHeader

In case anyone else wondered like me, change to 0 to stop completely, or to 1 to still work on click (no images)

For someone so wrapped up in hacker culture, JWZ seems extremely allergic to changing factory defaults. ALL of his complaints could be resolved by 10 minutes in the configuration software.

>It's is 5 rows tall instead of 6. This means that there is no Function / Media row, and most critically, no Escape key.

>I'm going to say that again to let it sink in. There is no Esc key. You type Esc by holding Mod and typing tilde.

He is so committed to the glyph painted on the keycap that he made it a major part of his review. That is a wild thing to witness.

I agree with some of his points, but I don't think they are design flaws. Firstly, the micro-switch buttons-- I fully expected those to be uncomfortable when I first saw the design concept. Using them as a space bar would really only be useful for programming without spaces. The function keys are also not important to me, so I plan to re-map them as additional space bars (fixing the issue of a narrow space bar). As for the display, it does look pretty ugly, but I don't this is a problem for a first product with other priorities. As for why it's there at all, I don't think its utility will be limited to displaying the key mapping; that's sort of the point, to make this keyboard hackable. I think it was a good decision to omit the escape key-- it's just not that common to use because it's difficult to reach. I'm not as familiar with Vi as I would like to be, but I would probably re-map escape even if there were an escape key. This keyboard definitely won't lack modifier options. Arrow keys suffer from the same problem, and any logical layout wastes space. As for home, end, page up, page down, etc... The placement of these keys is so variable between keyboards these days that I feel like some people would be unhappy with any placement. I probably would have preferred a more full keyboard layout, but I really don't think it's necessary given this level of flexibility, and spacing everything out like that is inefficient.

All that said, I do think some of these problems should be solved with time. For example, offering long key-caps to span the mod/space and fn switches. Offering a more cushioned hand rest would be nice if it's easy, but I would much rather let them focus on developing core functionality.

On the topic of accessories, I just found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/wiki/numpads

Modular is always better.

Yeah I pretty much agree with that whole review. The microswitch buttons are stupid.

Probably worth mentioning that it's a NSFW image since it's the middle of the workday.

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