I'm sorry, completely unrelated - Where can I buy a trackpoint? Or the closest standalone part that resembles it?
If I can smash a trackpoint onto a mechanical keyboard I would love to.
If I can smash a trackpoint onto a mechanical keyboard I would love to.
There's precedent. :)
If I heard correctly, when the inventor went to pitch TrackPoint in a meeting at IBM, he showed up with a normal keyboard, a TrackPoint assembly, and a drill, and proceeded to retrofit a TrackPoint in front of them.
He once spontaneously offered to give me a new TrackPoint SpaceSaver II keyboard (he had a couple retail boxes of them in his office). That happened to be my dream keyboard at the time, so I knew it was $170, which seemed way too expensive a gift for a poor grad student, so I couldn't accept. :)
Its Trackpoint is even better than a Thinkpad one. It's the original module with 2 improvements: the ability to adjust the nipple sensitivity from the keyboard and the large buttons which are actually full-blown keys with mechanical switches.
It's also a very nice keyboard on its own. The keycap shape is unique and very nice to the touch, once you get used to it.
I can even place the Shinobi directly on top of my Thinkpad's (X1C6) built-in keyboard so that I don't have to use the latter unless I'm traveling (and unwilling to bring the Shinobi along).
Now some laptop project (perhaps Framework?) just has to team up with Tex to make a real ThinkPad alternative.
https://www.pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Cate...
But that page says 'sorry one of our parts suppliers went belly up and we're trying to find a new one' so you can't buy a new one today.