UHK Keyboard review

Short after I came into Mexico to work, in December 2015, I found a project in Crowd Supply for a new keyboard that draws my attention, the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard (a.k.a UHK), and I decided to buy one. The characteristics that impressed me the most were that it was a mechanical keyboard (I'm a fan of mechanical keyboards) and, more important, it could split into two halves.

After a long wait (its delivery was delayed for more than two years) I can say I'm delighted with my acquisition. It's not the perfect keyboard, but it's quite close. What I miss the most from the keyboard is some extra separated keys, like the escape key or the arrow keys, but, on the other hand, it's easily configurable via its agent, so I'll be doing some changes to be more and more comfortable with it. The agent is Free Software, provided by the company that makes the keyboard, and available for Linux, macOS and Windows, which is something to appreciate.

As I suspected, the fact that it is a mechanical keyboard makes it very gentle with my fingers, and the fact that I can split it and orient it with several sideboards makes me feel more natural in my posture when I write with the UHK. It also comes with a wood palm rest that is comfortable for my wrist, and the size is compact but not too small, so I can move it around from my apartment to my office in my bag and, at the same time, is not too small that I type several keys at the same time.

I know it's not a cheap keyboard. Still, the quality worth it, and the agent, the keyboard firmware and its schematics are free (as in Free Software), so you are not only buying a great keyboard but supporting the Free Software and Hardware movement, apart from an honest business. I also appreciate a lot the excellent communication the UHK makers do, since they share all the progress of building the keyboard and the modules, the difficulties they have found, … I can assure it's not common to find a project that opens in all their path from the original idea of the final product.

The only thing I'm waiting now for is two extensions I ordered with the keyboard. The first one is a trackball to attach the mouse, and the second one is three extra keys that I plan to use to define some macros to make more automatic some recurrent tasks.

Happy Hacking!