Well, I discarded the keyboard as not usable because it doesn’t have arrow keys like the wired 60% keyboard and it didn’t have arrow keys like the dedicated keys on the Keychron V2. But, it turns out I was wrong about this and didn’t understand how it works. Net, net, while inconvenient as a daily driver, it’s size makes it an excellent “on the go keyboard”. I would probably take the Gateron Brown on those trips as it is quieter, but use the Blue if I know I’m just going to be by myself.
Now this keyboard has Gateron keys, so not really the nice click but they also have a version with Gateron Blue keys which are not as nice as the Cherry MX Blue on the Magicforce, but that thing is wired. Anyway, they are acceptable. I have both the Blue and the Brown and the Brown is actually a nice linear force one that is great for being quiet.
What is confusing about the Anne Pro 2 is just that the manual is so obscure and hard to understand. But the net is that I had thought that it does not have arrow keys, but this turns out not to be correct.
There are actually two ways to get arrow keys:
- If you quick tap (less than 150ms) the Shift, FN1, FN2 and Ctrl keys on the right, they act as up, left, right and down arrows. You can even hold other keys down like the left modifier keys. So I can do things like Ctrl-Right arrow. If you long press them then they will operate correctly. I nearly never use the FN1, FN2 or the right Ctrl key so this works out great!
- Second, if you download the Obins utility with
brew install obinsthen you can update firmware and most importantly you can set the left Caps Lk to be a Magic FN key. If you set it to be FN1 with long hold, then the wasd and ijkl keys acts as up, down, left and right arrows. Basically, the Caps Lock acts as a shift key that gets you those keys. Less useful to me because of the need to hold two keys down but it works.
Finally, in going through that application, you can also reset the keyboard layout, although the user interface is really obscure:
- Start the obins utility application and then go to Keyboard.
- You will see a bunch of other maps like Mac there, but it is not obvious how to set it.
- The trick is that there is
Downloadbutton at the bottom, this means download that keyboard layout to the keyboard and voila it switched the Win with the Alt key. The names still say Win and Alt as it starts as a Windows keyboard, but nice that you can swap the modifier keys.
Finally, some of the basics, on the back is a DIP switch which sets Bluetooth on or off. And you can have up to four devices paired, so to start pairing hold the FN2 and press the number 1 and that is connection 1 and so forth. The legend tells you what is going on on the side of the keys. The symbols to the left is what happens with FN1 and to the right is for FN2 as a hint.
They don’t have any hint for the TAP function which is why I missed it in the first place.
Finally, unlike the Keychron since there is a little applet, you can actually know the battery level in this keyboard which is great particularly since it only lasts 34 hours (presumably without the backlight
