HHKB Studio: Two-minute review
Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB) is known for its quirky, niche devices that appeal to a small, dedicated band of enthusiasts. The HHKB Studio doesn’t break that trend but instead leans into it hard, and it’s a keyboard that you’re either going to love or hate. At £325, the stakes are high.
Before we get into the quirks, let’s talk about the more down-to-earth aspects. For one thing, the typing feel of the Studio is absolutely beautiful. I’m not usually a fan of linear switches, but those in the Studio are smooth and responsive, with what feels like an almost perfect degree of travel. There’s no bottoming out here. They also sound lovely and quiet in use, with the one exception of the space bar, which is unmistakably clunky when pressed.
The Studio’s linear switches are hot-swappable, and HHKB has made the PCB compatible with both three-pin and five-pin MX switches, giving you a huge range of options (although in doing so it has given up the Topre switches loved by so many HHKB fans). The PBT keycaps are also notably thick, adding to the exceptional typing feel. The PBT material means there’s no shine-through backlighting, though.
HHKB’s Keymap Tool app is solid, and it lets you remap keys, create profiles, change the functions of the gesture pads (I’ll get to those later), and more. The chassis, meanwhile, is hefty and fairly weighty, with thick plastic around every surface. It is a little rattly when you put it down, though, and this seems to be mostly due to the board’s flip-out feet.
OK, enough about the conventional aspects of the Studio. What about the more “eclectic” stuff? Well, the Studio is designed to be an all-in-one device that acts not only as a keyboard, but as a mouse, too.
It comes with a “pointing stick” nubbin nestled between the G, H, and B keys. Nudge it in any direction and your mouse pointer follows. Below the space bar are three keys: left and right mouse buttons, plus a middle button that acts as a modifier key (hold it and move the nubbin to scroll a web page, for instance).
This substitute mouse arrangement is fine, but it never grabbed me as something totally essential, and it can’t beat the control you get from a standalone mouse.
On the bottom and side edges of the Studio are four gesture strips. These can be customized, but by default they move the cursor up and down (left strip), move the cursor left and right (bottom-left strip), switch app windows (bottom-right strip), and scroll windows and web pages (right strip). These are fiddly and unintuitive, and I only used them begrudgingly.
At times I had no choice, though, because the Studio lacks arrow keys in an effort to make it more compact. Unfortunately, the gesture strips are far fiddlier and less accurate than simply tapping an arrow key would be. If I needed to move the cursor when typing up a document, I often found it was quicker to just click to reposition, rather than trying to get the gesture strip to move the cursor to the right place.
Things like this undeniably feel like solutions to problems that HHKB itself has created. If you don’t remove the arrow keys, for example, then there’s no need for the finicky, over-engineered gesture strips. Arrow keys do not feel like much of a problem unless you really want the most compact keyboard imaginable, but even then, I’m not sure that the Studio’s answer is the correct one.
Some of the other design choices are a little baffling. The Control key has been removed and instead replaces the Caps Lock key for seemingly no other reason than that this makes the layout more symmetrical, but it means another interruption of your muscle memory. The decision to make the key legends incredibly faint, meanwhile, makes them almost impossible to see in every lighting condition.
By default, the backspace key (which normally removes the character to the left of the cursor) actually performs the delete function (removing the character to the right of the cursor) on both Windows and macOS layouts. You can change this by flipping a switch hidden under the battery cover, but the default setting runs counter to the key’s regular way of working (and your muscle memory).
HHKB says you can’t change this in macOS but, much to my relief, I had no trouble doing so, other than having to turn the keyboard off and on again for the change to come into effect.
If you can accept all the eccentricities, the HHKB Studio offers a highly satisfying typing experience that is almost infinitely customizable. But if you don’t need the mouse nubbin and gesture control strips – or don’t like the faint keycaps and repositioned buttons – £325 is an eye-wateringly high price to pay.
HHKB Studio: Price and availability
The HHKB Studio costs £325. That’s very expensive for a keyboard, even for the vast majority of our picks for the best keyboards on the market. You should be sure you need all of the HHKB Studio’s features before pulling the trigger.
Should you buy the HHKB Studio?
| Value | Some will gladly pay for its specialized feature set, but the price is too high for most. | 2 / 5 |
| Design | The sturdy chassis and thick PBT keycaps win our approval, but there are small missteps, like the rattly space bar and flip-out feet. | 3.5 / 5 |
| Performance | The Studio offers a superb, quiet typing experience. It works with Windows and macOS, connects to four devices, and its software makes it highly customizable. | 5 / 5 |
| Average rating | Brilliant at the basics, but full of strange quirks. | 3.5 / 5 |
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
HHKB Studio: Also consider
Looking elsewhere? Give these keyboards some thought…
How I tested the HHKB Studio
I tested the HHKB Studio for a few weeks by spending time typing articles, browsing the web, and generally using my computer. I assessed it its compatibility in both Windows and macOS. As well as that, I ran the companion Keymap Tool app through its paces.
- First reviewed September 2024
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alexblake.techradar@gmail.com (Alex Blake)
