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Comment by disposedtrolley | Hacker News Reader

I have an original Topre Realforce and an HHKB. They’re both reliable, no-nonsense keyboards.

I have a couple of HHKBs and fully agree. They’ve seen a ridiculous amount of use in the past 5 years and show no signs of giving in any time soon. Expect that if any part of it fails, it’ll be the USB mini-B connector.

I have an 11 year old and a 4 year old [HHKB]. Used/abused for 8+ hours/day, 5+ days/week. For the first 7 years of its life the first HHKB was transported to and from work every day, which can’t have helped it’s lifespan. Regardless they are still both going strong, though the keys on the older board are noticeably softer.

Hah, I have the same two and I agree. Realforce for the office since it's quieter and HHKB for home and games. My only complaint about the HHKB is the arrow and page up/down keys are in really strange places that took forever to build into muscle memory.

HHKB is amazing for vim programming.

I wish it was easier to buy keyboards with a correctly-positioned control key.

That’s the beauty of custom keycaps and boards with customizable firmware! Almost every premium GMK, ePBT, etc. keycap set will come with a Caps Lock replacement key labeled Control. It’s lovely.

So I just googled to see if my keyboard (Realforce 88u) has customisable firmware and apparently it has internal dip switches to configure the behaviour of ctrl and Windows keys!

The Realforce 88u I had came with alternate Caps Lock / Control keycaps in the box.

Why bother? It is one checkbox in the settings and then every keyboard has caps as control.

If you customize lots of things and carry your keyboard to many different computers, I guess doing it in hardware is marginally "better" than just using software, but ctrlcaps is common enough that the software is just there by default.

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