An ambitious proposal [Topre]

[daerid]

I am infatuated with my HHKB. I love everything about it. Especially the feel. Unfortunately, I work in Visual Studio all day, and that means I need my arrow keys; hence the RealForces (which are still light years ahead of anything else except the HHKB). What I would love is a RealForce layout with the key feel of the HHKB. Thinking about the difference between them, the single most striking one is that the RF has a metal plate whereas the HHKB does not. So that got me thinking about possibly removing the plate from my RF.

Does anybody know if this is feasible/possible? I hesitate to go tearing in there on a ~$300 board.

PS: To those who would say "just get used to the HHKB layout in Visual Studio", I have a decade+ of muscle memory in Visual Studio that would just take too long to unlearn on the HHKB, and I have deadlines to meet.

[hashbaz]

If we could figure out how to do this, I would mod my RF for sure.  I love the HHKB sound and feel -- it is subtly different from a RF.

[daerid]

Taking the RF out of it's case is relatively simple (I've done a case swap on my 55g), lemme see what I can find.

[Michael]

It would be an extremely difficult task. You would basically need to create a mold in plastic, similar to what you see when you remove the keycaps from the HHKB, and somehow integrate that into the RF case.

Another idea, would be for you to create a mini-pad with just arrow keys and program it. Or possibly create a palm wrest with a built-in arrow cluster off to the right of it?

[daerid]

That might be a better solution. Possibly get a 23ub and use that.

[khaangaaroo]

If only the HHKB Pro JP was ANSI. Maybe one day.

[daerid]

That would be pretty sweet.

Of course, if Visual Studio had more than half-ass vim support I'd be in heaven.

Or if I could get Resharper to work in Vim, either or would be phenominal.