I’m new to this community, so I thought I would begin by sharing my HHKB setup. I haven’t seen this particular setup described anywhere, so maybe this may be helpful to someone else in a similar situation. My main issue was that I just couldn’t adapt to the traditional backspace being one row lower than where I expect them to be, but there is no DIP switch or HHKB setting that maps the backquote/tilde key to backspace. Also, I really wanted to retain the cmd esc shortcut to cycle through windows.
Here’s my setup. I decided that my muscle memory was too ingrained to change the backspace location. On my Mac I already had remapped caps lock to control, so that was already fine. So, I turned on the 2 and 6 DIP switches, which enabled the volume/media keys and wake from sleep, and then used Karabiner to change delete to traditional forward delete, map shift esc to tilde (so i could cmd shift esc to cycle through windows), map cmd esc to backquote, and map backquote to traditional backspace. Karabiner has a handy HHKB section that allowed most of this. So after all that, I now have backspace in the expected right corner, cmd (shift) esc to cycle through windows, and still have access to the other keys I lost through this process. For the navigation keys, I kept the built-in Fn combos, and after a few days got the hang of it. Despite others’ complaints about the USB hub, I had no problem using it for my mouse.
By the way, I originally had doubts about getting the white, thinking it would look cheap and plasticky. Wow, was I wrong. First, it’s neither white nor beige; it’s more bone, white chocolate, butter cream, ivory, and the darker big keys are soft pastel that blends in beautifully with the rest.
Finally, the feel. All of you know the feel, but coming from browns, for me the difference was not all positive. I loved the feel and sound, but my speed and accuracy suffered at first. On the Cherry browns, you don’t have to always bottom out, and I could glide over the keys at speed. On the HHKB, the more deliberate and defined downstroke took some getting used to, especially on the space bar. Everything else, silky smooth and just a joy to feel underneath my fingers. As a former pianist, this feeling, in some part due to the chalky PBT, reminds me of the older ivory piano keys – they feel just right, grippy, and the downward inertia after the actuation is the closest thing to a piano action I’ve ever encountered.
