Keyboard Mod: Forceful Caps Lock Remapping on a Macally MK-96

A few years ago I went on a mechanical keyboard buying spree. Among the keyboards that I purchased were two Macally MK-96s. I got them from an eBay seller for around $15 USD apiece. I gave one of them away to a friend and the other one remained unused in its box until a few months ago.

The MK-96 is an old Macintosh keyboard that is no longer made. I like that is is fairly compact. The small footprint is achieved by omitting the Insert/Delete, Home/End, Page Up/Page Down cluster, and by moving the arrow keys to the main section of the board. It’s a different philosophy from the tenkeyless design. The latter foregoes the numeric keypad while keeping the rest of the board standard. As a programmer, I rarely use the numeric keypad. So I prefer the tenkeyless design. If you want a compact keyboard and use the numeric keypad a lot, you might like the MK-96 approach better.

The keyboard uses the old Mac ADB connector and you need an ADB to USB adapter to use it with modern computers. I only got around to purchasing an iMate adapter a few months ago, which is why the keyboard remained unused until then.

Simplified White ALPS

So, what’s so special about this keyboard? In a word – ALPS. Pop a few keycaps off and this is what we see.

The MK-96 uses simplified white ALPS switches, which are tactile and clicky. They are quite loud, but provide a very crisp tactile feedback when the keys are depressed. If you like clicky keyboards, you should try white ALPS. I find that the tactile bump is more pronounced on the simplified white ALPS than on buckling springs. Actuation force is also higher than buckling springs.

Initial Issues and Workarounds

The first issue that I faced was the arrow keys layout. The MK-96 has them in an L shaped cluster instead of the now standard inverted T. Luckily I use hjkl to move around in Vim and I was able to ease into the layout without getting overly frustrated.

The next thing that kept tripping me over was the fact that the keycap nubs are on K and D instead of F and J. This again is non standard, and it makes it harder for me to correctly position my fingers over the home row. Since I find the home row by feel, I switched the caps around for these keys.

Another drawback is the position of the Esc key. On the MK-96, Esc is not placed directly above the ` key. Instead, it is placed above the 2 key, and that messes with my muscle memory when I’m using Vim. It’s driven me to finally bind kj to enter normal mode.

The Dreaded Caps Lock

I use the Ctrl key a lot for window management in tmux and Vim. When setting up a new keyboard, one of the first things that I do is bind Ctrl to Caps Lock. I went ahead and did this with the MK-96. However, I quickly noticed a problem. When I held down the Caps Lock, and pressed another key multiple times, only the first key press was registered. For example, I’d hold down Caps Lock and press E multiple times to scroll down in Vim, and I would only be able to scroll down one line. In order to scroll down again, I had to release the Caps Lock and start over. This quickly became annoying.

Forceful Remapping

This was a deal breaker and made the keyboard unusable for me. Something had to be done. I grabbed a screwdriver and off came the case.

I turned the keyboard over and looked for the location on the PCB where the Caps Lock was soldered. If I scratched off the connections to the Caps Lock, it would prevent the keyboard from registering Caps when it was depressed. I would then be able to rewire the key switch to Ctrl.

I grabbed a pointy tool and scratched away at the PCB until the connections were cut of. I was not pretty but hey, it worked! I then rewired Caps Lock in parallel to the Ctrl key. As you can see, my soldering skills are pretty crap!

Finally, I connected the keyboard back to the computer to test it out. Success! I now had a keyboard I could live with.

Conclusion

So, is the MK-96 my daily driver? Sadly, no. My current favourite white ALPS keyboard is a SIIG Minitouch, which I’m using at work. The SIIG is more compact, has a sane arrow keys layout, and the Esc key is where I expect it to be. However, it is still fun to whip out the Macally once in a while.

Further reading: There’s a lot of information on various keyboards and key switch technologies at geekhack. Check out the wiki, starting with the mechanical keyboard guide.

Related Post: Topre Realforce 86U

vydark – a Comfortable Vim Colour Scheme for Everyday Use

I’ve made the yang to vylight’s ying, and I’m calling it vydark. My goal was to create a dark-background colour scheme that’s comfortable for use over extended coding sessions.

Installing vydark

1. Download vyldark.vim from vim.org
2. Copy the file to your ~/.vim/colors/ directory
3. In Vim, do :colorscheme vydark

vydark is meant for use with a GUI version of Vim.

See also: vylight, the light background version of this colour scheme.

Is Your Bash Prompt Cramping Your Style?

It is sometimes hard to form a mental model of a directory tree when working with the command line. GUI shells tend to provide more visual cues. For example, in OS X, the Finder has a column view that allows you to quickly see how directories are nested.

So, like a lot of Bash users, I used to get around this by printing the current working directory in my shell prompt:

However, things can get pretty cramped when dealing with deeply nested directories. A better solution is needed. Ideally, I want a minimal prompt that just displays my user@host. I only need to get my bearings when I’m moving around in the directory tree. Therefore, I’ve come up with the following.

The current working directory is printed after every cd. This allows me to get my bearings when I need to, while keeping my Bash prompt short and sweet. The following incantation in ~/.bashrc does the trick:

# Print working directory after a cd.
cd() {
    if [[ $@ == '-' ]]; then
        builtin cd "$@" > /dev/null  # We'll handle pwd.
    else
        builtin cd "$@"
    fi
    echo -e "   \033[1;30m"`pwd`"\033[0m"
}

Have you come up with other solutions for longpromptitis? Let me know in the comments!

Recent Collaboration: Classic Albums Live

I recently collaborated with my friend Daniel Brouse on a website for Classic Albums Live. Daniel did the design and most of the markup while I did the dev bits.

Classic Albums Live gives audiences the opportunity to hear some of their all-time favourite albums live on stage, performed by outstanding musicians in venues around Australia.

The website allows users to sign up and vote for their favourite albums. I use the Last.fm web service to provide auto completion for the album search. The user drags and drops albums to order her votes.

Classic Albums Live can then view which albums are popular among their audience.

Users can view upcoming tours, read artist and creative bios, and check out the show dates. The site supports custom themes for each tour. Each tour is essentially a mini sub site.

I built a simple content management system so that Classic Albums Live can manage the tour and site contents.

The gallery module supports image cropping, and user-defined aspect rations. The site does automatic image resizing and caching of resized images. The client only has to worry about uploading and cropping their images. The site will generate appropriately sized images whenever they are needed on the front end.

The blog is pretty standard as far as blogs go. It supports post creation and archival, guest and member comments, comment approval and moderation, and tags.

The membership system allows Classic Albums Live to manage the website’s users. The site integrates with Campaign Monitor for mailing lists.

Is there a classic album that you would like to hear live? Let Classic Albums Live know!