As far as keyboards go, everyone has their favorite style. Whether they have audible clicks or not, what size and layout they are and even their color. Many users of Sun hardware are all too familiar with the Sun Type 4/5 keyboards - and even the newest Type 6 keyboard. While these keyboards are excellent in quality and feel, and fully support all the options that Solaris and OpenWindows or CDE have to offer... They're quite large, and can take up a generous amount of your desktop real estate.

Enter the Happy Hacking Keyboard from PFU America, Inc. This little gem of a keyboard is one of the only methods of replacing your Sun keyboard with an aftermarket one, short of getting the Sun Interface Adapter and a PS/2 keyboard from the Intel world.

The keyboard is extremely small in size, which is it's major selling point. While the keys are all full-sized, the entire keyboard only occupies as much space as the main keys on a regular keyboard. That is, the function key rows on the top and bottom as often found on Sun keyboards is gone, as is the numeric keypad. All that's left is the core key set - not unlike a notebook keyboard.

The keys themselves are full-sized and have normal key travel as on a typical Sun keyboard. There is no discernable audible feedback, making the keyboard relatively silent in operation - but has a good amount of tactile feedback. The key pressure is a little higher than you might expect, but something you quickly get used to.

The keyboard overall is very good quality both in contruction and feel. Just picking it up you'd think it was light due to it's small size, but actually has some heft tp it.

The keyboard's first and foremost "feature" is that it is ultra-small. With it, you can ditch the rather large Sun Type 6 (or Type 4/5) keyboard and reclaim a large percentage of your desktop space back.

Some other things that make this keyboard really stand out is it's capability to work with multiple platforms. If you wanted to use this keyboard on your PC or Mac, all you'd need to do is pick up an extra (separate, at cost) cable. Macintosh users will find the layout quite similar to the Classic Mac keyboards, as the option (alt) and Apple (meta) keys are in place - symbols and all. The PC users might miss the Windows and menu keys though.

Another important feature of this keyboard is the ability, through a small sliding switch on the back - to modify certain key behavior. You can modify the "Meta" key location and change the "BS/Del" key behavior. Depending on what you're used to, you may want to alter the latter as I did - having the "Del" key send a BS character.

For us Sun (and Mac) folks, on the back of the keyboard is a small button that controls the system power, just like we're used to. Be careful when picking up the keyboard though, that you don't accidentally hit this button. It requires a little force and it is quite small - but being out of site, you might forget about it.

There aren't a whole lot, but some that you need to be aware of. First off and most noticeable is the key layout. If you rely on the function or arrow keys a lot - or the numeric keypad, then this keyboard might force you into a new way of doing things. Like a notebook keyboard, these keys are now accessed via a "Fn" key combination.

Another downside might be the price. How many keyboards sell for $139US these days? Not a whole lot in this $15US keyboard world of PC clones. Why should you pay so much more for this keyboard? Is it worth it? Yes and no, and here's why. Consider that this keyboard works with Sun, Mac and PC hardware and saves a LOT of space. Space can be at a premium in a rack of equipment at the data center, for example. If this is appeals to you, then the price works out.

A minor downside, and arguable at that - is that this keyboard only comes in a greyish putty color that matches just about everything. The simpler (and PC-only) version of this keyboard called the "Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite" comes in this color as well as black. Considering that no Sun equipment is black, it's not much of an issue. The Mac folks would get squeamish though.

I've been personally using the Happy Hacking Keyboard for a few months now, and have gotten quite used to it. In all honesty, I don't miss the larger-sized Sun keyboard all that much as I'd much rather have more room on my desk. As such, there are very few things that I can find wrong with this keyboard.

Depending on what applications you use, especially text editors - will determine what features of a regular keyboard you'll miss. For me, I tend to use either "nedit" or "joe" as my text editor as well as Netscape Navigator and the GNOME desktop, which use arrow keys for navigation primarily. In the case of GNOME and the Sawfish window manager that I use, I simply remapped the "shortcuts" to be more friendly with this keyboard. Using the "Fn" key combinations gets to be tedious when you need arrow key functionality a lot. Users of vi don't need to worry about this much, so it's a non-issue there. With some creative key-mapping in your applications, this annoyance can be lessened or even eliminated altogether and the few times you then need the arrow keys, you'll never notice. I don't miss the function keys, which I never really used anyway. Basically, if you're comfortable and proficient on a notebook computer, this keyboard will feel like a really good notebook keyboard.

Other than a minor issue with arrow keys, nothing really bothers me about this keyboard. It's been a win-win situation. Accountants would miss the numeric keypad, but for the rest of us, this thing is hard to beat.