This is a pretty interesting keyboard. At the end of the post I'll render an UNICODE ascii picture of it for those interested.

I wanted to write something quickly as a documentation exercise and as something perhaps useful to others.

I've had this old Keypro FK-9000 and Soarer Converter lying around for a couple of years now and I had yet to play with it.

So, last night, I finally decided to check it out.

Basically it's an old 5 PIN keyboard that has a few cool tricks:

• built in calculator and lcd
  • You can hit a latching key on the keyboard and the numpad input will then be sent to the little on board LCD screen
• 12 on board programmable macro keys

The Soarer Converter cable I have, which as I understand is basically an atmega chip shoved into a cable, also allows me to remap keys as the scan codes come into the converter, before they get to the computer.

It took me a while to figure out how to program the keys so for any future readers hopefully this will help:

1. Open a text editor
2. Hold the `Prog` key and hit the key you want to program (PF1-12)
3. Enter the key sequence you'd like to program
4. Hit the key you want to program again

Example:

Prog->PF1sometringPF1

This will also work with CTRL,RETURN,ALT,etc, however the macros all have a 14 char limit, with control chars taking up 2 chars.

Here I'm going to document my own macros:

• PF11: Ctrl-G – Emacs escape hatch/escape/stop
• PF1: Ctrl-x-b – Emacs switch buffer menu
• PF2: Ctrl-x-b-RETURN – Based on Ido menu ordering behaves as switch to last buffer
• PF3: Ctrl-x-Ctrl-f – Open file
• PF4: Ctrl-c-Ctrl-f – Open file at point
• PF5: M-xeshell-RETURN – Open eshell
• PF7: Ctrl-x-5-2 – Open new emacs frame (window for non emacsers)
• PF8: Ctrl-x-5-0 – Close emacs frame
• PF9: gT – literally gT, AKA previous tab in vim/evil mode
• PF10: gt – literally gt, next tab in vim/evil mode