HHKB or Tenkeyless… how do you enter special characters?

[NKRO]

I am on the verge of purchasing a HHKB Pro 2 when it hit me: there doesnʼt seem to be a way to enter special characters that require ALT+ codes.
Do you just go without the use of them? Use something like PopChar?

On OS X this doesnʼt seem like nearly as much of an issue, as there are good text replacement apps (like TextExpander/Typinator) and the OS has shortcuts built in for just about everything I use.
For example, em and en dashes are just OPT - or OPT SHIFT -. But I am back with Windows as my main OS now, and there itʼs ALT+0150 and ALT+0151 on the numpad—the number row doesnʼt work. (and would be considerably slower)

After years of laptop use, going back to a desktop keyboard & mouse full time is giving me pain in my right shoulder.
I really like the look of the HHKB layout, and I really want to avoid having a number pad attached to the keyboard for ergonomic reasons. Iʼm pretty sure that an external numpad is not going to be any better ergonomically—itʼs out of the way of the mouse, but you still have to reach for it, so itʼs just shifting the problem around.
Of course thereʼs more to it than just the keyboard & mouse position, which I am also looking to address (looking into mouse alternatives, and my workspace/posture) but bringing the keyboard & mouse as close together as possible really does seem like it will help, and I have no problem losing the rest of the keys other than this issue.

[czarek]

I'm using HHKB Pro 2 with OS X and it's awesome. I'm typing a lot in Polish where you need to press Option to get characters like 'żółć' etc. In this regard HHKB works just as well as any other keyboard. At first I didn't like the cursor keys missing but after few days I got used to FN combinations. The only thing which still drives me nuts is placement of backslash and tilde. I use them a lot (for Perl coding and general Vim navigation) and I often mistype them or type '=' instead of '\'. Aside from that it's awesome keyboard, I like the layout much better than Filco Tenkeyless. And I don't miss the numpad at all. If I had to type a lot of numbers it would mean I'm a bad coder, hehe

[NKRO]

Yeah, I canʼt imagine too many problems on OS X due to how you enter special characters there, but on Windows I canʼt see a way to do it without a numpad.
I donʼt need them for data entry, but do use special characters a lot when writing.

[SmallFry]

I usually just Google the symbol... I don't type enough of the characters to really matter. I suppose you could see if you could AHK the Alt+number row to act as the number pad which seems more and more plausible in my opinion.

[metalliqaz]

The Realforce tenkeyless has a numpad layer.  With the HHKB, you could get a Topre tenkeypad to go with it!

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I have two facilities for extended ASCII and Unicode entry:

a) United Kingdom International keyboard layout which provides dead key accents and some basic typographical symbols
b) An AutoHotkey_L script for both extended ASCII and Unicode bindings

Together, the alt gr or ctrl+alt(+shift) combinations give me characters like + − ÷ × (real minus, not a hyphen - or dash – —), → ™ © ® • ° etc, together with åçccénţŝ

[NKRO]

AutoHotkey sounds like the best solution, thanks. I'd prefer it to be a hardware solution, but I don't change between machines that often.

[stingrae]

I have two facilities for extended ASCII and Unicode entry:

a) United Kingdom International keyboard layout which provides dead key accents and some basic typographical symbols
b) An AutoHotkey_L script for both extended ASCII and Unicode bindings

Together, the alt gr or ctrl+alt(+shift) combinations give me characters like + − ÷ × (real minus, not a hyphen - or dash – —), → ™ © ® • ° etc, together with åçccénţŝ

My gosh been using hyphen for all these years as minus.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

AutoHotkey sounds like the best solution, thanks. I'd prefer it to be a hardware solution, but I don't change between machines that often.

I'm surprised that someone like Soarer isn't being hired by the likes of PFU to write a superduper flashable firmware system and some great default firmware packed with features – for the price of an HHKB I wouldn't consider it to be too unreasonable ;-) With all the knowledge on display in the community, the state of keyboard controllers in top-end keyboards remains lacklustre.

[NKRO]

AutoHotkey sounds like the best solution, thanks. I'd prefer it to be a hardware solution, but I don't change between machines that often.

I'm surprised that someone like Soarer isn't being hired by the likes of PFU to write a superduper flashable firmware system and some great default firmware packed with features – for the price of an HHKB I wouldn't consider it to be too unreasonable ;-) With all the knowledge on display in the community, the state of keyboard controllers in top-end keyboards remains lacklustre.

Well knowing my luck, a HHKB3 with a fully programmable firmware will be announced shortly after I receive my HHKB2 now that I've ordered it.

[metalliqaz]

I wouldn't count on that.  They haven't changed that thing in quite a while.

[sordna]

It's scandalous that the HHKB, at that price, is not programmable. Unacceptable.

[NKRO]

It's scandalous that the HHKB, at that price, is not programmable. Unacceptable.

I wouldn't go that far.

I will say, I'm surprised that there isn't a programmable USB device that plugs in between the keyboard and PC that "translates" your keystrokes. So rather than being limited to purchasing a specific keyboard that has a programmable firmware, you could plug in any keyboard, and have your own custom layout running.

I think that might actually be preferable to a programmable keyboard if it were small enough.

[sordna]

I'm going that far because I'm spoiled by the programmability of the Kinesis Advantage keyboards :-)
It's just awesome.

[_js_]

I wouldn't count on that.  They haven't changed that thing in quite a while.

Indeed.  Every now and then I wonder if/when the HHKB Pro 3 will come out, but nothing seems to change.  So far, anyway.