Treat Your Fingers to a New Keyboard

'Penny-wise, pound-foolish' goes for your favorite input device, too.

You're going to think I'm nuts (what else is new?), but I want you to plunk down $189 for a keyboard. Before you suggest I up my meds, consider this: You wouldn't think of doing without that LCD monitor you paid a little extra for, would you? (If you're still CRT-bound, my sympathies to your tired eyes.) Just as important to your productivity--and your health--is a solid, well-designed keyboard. As luck has it, there are two on the market that are worth the extra dough (my second choice costs just $45).

The keyboards that ship with most PCs are torture to use: mushy-to-the-touch feel, tiny Backspace key, narrow spacebar, and weirdly placed backslash key (\). (For another look at what's wrong with keyboards, see Stephen Manes's May Full Disclosure.

By comparison, my 12-year-old Northgate OmniKey Ultra keyboard has a sharp, crisp feel because of its clickity-clack mechanical keys. Its backslash key is placed under a large L-shaped Enter key, and the Backspace key is double-size.

Northgate is long gone, but the Northgate keyboard has been resurrected by Creative Vision Technologies. The company's $189 Avant Stellar has the same great feel as the OmniKey, along with features that let me get things done fast, starting with two sets of function keys--12 across the top and another 12 in a double row down the left side. (My feng shui consultant approves, provided the keyboard faces east.) The keys on the side make it a breeze to touch-type Ctrl, Alt, and function-key combinations in Windows, Word, and other programs. For example, I can do a Shift-F7 spelling check or close an app with Alt-F4 while blindfolded.

A Reordering of the Keys

The Avant Stellar allows me to remap any key to any other key. For instance, I much prefer having the Ctrl key to the left of the letter 'A', exactly where God and IBM (no longer synonymous) first thought it should go. Très cool, non? I can also create short macros that let one key represent many keystrokes. The Avant Stellar uses a PS/2 connection and works with all versions of Windows.

If you're not as enamored with the Avant Stellar as I am, Microsoft's $45 Office Keyboard makes a good second choice. The keyboard uses a logical layout, and its keys are just the right size. A row of buttons above the function keys either open or work inside Word, Excel, and other Microsoft applications, and a toggle key gives the function keys a second set of operations. There's also a clever keyboard scroll wheel and an 'Application' button--like the Alt-Tab and Shift-Alt-Tab keystrokes that cycle through your open apps--on the left side of the keyboard (to the dismay of left-handed mouse users). The downside? You better like your keyboards large: These two are both big enough to snowboard on.

But what if you only want to remap your current keyboard? For anyone who really wants to get the upper hand on their key layout, there's Dev-Labs' $15 Keyboard Remapper, which lets you remap almost all of your keys and add macros. And if you're a keyboard-shortcut kind of person (or would like to be), then grab a copy of Camtech's valuable KeyBoarding freeware, which lists 2900 keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Microsoft products. Get both of these programs (a trial version of Keyboard Remapper) in our Downloads library.

I'll have more remapping tools and keyboard shortcuts in an upcoming issue of my online newsletter. Sign up for it today.

Buying Information

Creative Vision Technologies Avant Stellar Keyboard 5 stars (05-20-2002) $189

Buying Information

Microsoft Office Keyboard 4 stars (05-20-2002) $45

Buying Information

Dev-Labs Keyboard Remapper 3.5 stars (05-20-2002) $15

Contributing Editor Steve Bass is president of the Pasadena IBM Users Group. He can be reached at homeoffice@pcworld.com.