Keyboard love

Clickety clackety click. Yes indeedy, I'm firing on all cylinders here, and the room resounds to the rat-a-tat of my spiffy new keyboard. It's a Das Keyboard Model S Professional UK and I love it to bits.¹ As a typewriter, it's the best. Not just the noise but the spacing, pitch and feel of the keys is just lovely. The big problem is actually getting the keys to do what I expect them to do. I knew the layout would be the one favoured by all those other computer manufacturers, but I figured it would be reasonably easy to bend it to the will of my muscle memory. Not so. Getting the £ instead of the # was a doddle and I still need to swap @ and " around. But it has taken me forever to figure out how to get the keys in the bottom row working the way I'm used to, even with the help of a nifty little thing called DoubleCommand.

One problem is the names for the bloody keys. The DoubleCommand innards don't make it easy to work out which key you want to act as which, but I did eventually get the ones that really matter ² sorted out to my satisfaction. Couldn't they just give some simple options, like change this picture to that picture? That would work for me. I had no idea the Application key was even called that. I've never used it on the PC at work, and I can't think of anything to use it for here. Suggestions? And while I'm about it, will I ever get used to the media controls being where they are? Indeed, will I ever get used to even having media keys?

But you know, those really are niggles. I'm actually glad that my old iMac keyboard gave up the ghost. Now what I really want is two more of these suckers at work.