Your Blissful Hacking Keyboard can lastly get recent caps.
Whereas common keyboards have a humiliation of keycap choices, Topre boards just like the HHKB or Realforce R3 don’t. They’ve roughly been relegated to OEM-profile PBT keycaps with dye-sublimated legends, in mild gray, charcoal, white, or (just lately) a number of more colorful options. One thing as primary as black keycaps with white legends simply didn’t exist for unmodified Topre boards. Till now.
I’ve been typing on a near-final set of white-on-black Ursa caps for a few weeks now, they usually’re as near a must-buy for Topre customers as any utterly non-obligatory buy might be. The scooped spherical caps are comfy to kind on, and the perimeters are well-defined with out being too sharp. There’s only a little bit of texture to the typing floor. The centered legends are crisp and well-aligned, and harking back to basic SA and DSA keycaps with out being equivalent. The stems on my pattern set don’t twist like different aftermarket caps I’ve tried. The underside row is totally convex, just like the area bar; it’s unusually comfy and so far as I can inform it’s distinctive amongst keyboard profiles in that respect. It’s all simply very effectively executed.
I’ve been utilizing them on my Leopold FC660C as a result of that’s what I’ve; you’ll be able to see them on the extra widespread Blissful Hacking Keyboard over at Lightning Keyboards. The legends on the white-on-black keycaps can be barely brighter than those on my samples, in keeping with FKCaps’ Simon Tarchichi, however they’re in any other case equivalent to the ultimate variations, which I’ll get when my preorder arrives.
The Ursa keycaps are available in cream-and-grey, in black with white legends (with non-obligatory pink or blue modifier keys), and in a limited-edition retro-inspired brown, inexperienced, and cream. There are additionally clean variations of the basic and black colours.
Pricing for the extras is similar as in the course of the group purchase. It’ll price $80 to cowl an HHKB, or $120 for a tenkeyless or full-sized board. (You will get a full-sized set of blanks for $60 when you don’t want the legends.) There’s additionally a brand new $8 accent package, in pink or blue, with simply an Escape and Enter key. The Minicom colour is a restricted version, and Tarchichi tells me it gained’t be restocked, however the firm plans to maintain the opposite colours out there, and launch new variants sooner or later, so don’t fear when you miss out on extras.
I’m an enormous fan of Topre boards, and it’s nice to have an inexpensive, high-quality keycap choice that doesn’t contain taking your keyboard aside to make it MX-compatible. (Though that’s also getting better and less expensive in the very near future). As I stated when the group purchase launched, I’m not going to let you know to purchase these keycaps. However I did.