It’s a nice addition to the SpaceMouse maker’s portfolio, but this keyboard has some kinks.

In October, professional peripheral provider 3Dconnexion added a new product to its portfolio: the 3Dconnexion Keyboard Pro. The company’s past products have all been mice, including the CadMouse family and the company’s most recognizable product, the 3D SpaceMouse line. With the launch of the Keyboard Pro, 3Dconnexion has rounded out its input offerings.
We got our hands on the new Keyboard Pro to put it to the test, and here’s what we found.
Intro to the 3Dconnexion Keyboard Pro

The world of keyboards is vast. RGB lighting, mechanical switches, and customizable keycaps are just some of the variables at play in this market. The new 3Dconnexion Keyboard Pro doesn’t offer any of this variety or flash. It’s not made for gamers, nor enthusiasts who have a visceral reaction to the phrase “Topre switch.” The 3dconnexion Keyboard Pro is made for CAD professionals.
But what does that mean, exactly? For 3dconnexion, it means two things: comfort and customization.
Let’s tackle comfort first. The Keyboard Pro is designed with ergonomics in mind, striving to keep professional users comfortable over an entire day of 3D modeling. To that end, the Keyboard Pro includes a 3-inch-tall palm rest underneath the keys. The keys themselves have “ergonomically shaped concave keycaps,” according to 3dconnexion.
The keys do indeed feel comfortable to type on, but I can’t comment on whether they have any specific ergonomic advantages over other keyboards. The scissor switch keys can be pressed with a light touch and have a subdued click to them. It was a satisfying typing experience for me, though I’m not terribly picky about these things (I’m not even sure how to pronounce “Topre switch”).
The palm rest is a feature I wish 3dconnnexion had left out. I trust that it’s an ergonomic benefit, but it comes at the cost of taking up about 50 percent more desk space than would otherwise be required for the Keyboard Pro. It’s a large keyboard, measuring 9” (229mm) tall and a total of 18.9” (480mm) wide (14.4”/366mm for the keyboard and 4.5”/114mm for the numpad). I’d happily take some extra space over the palm rest, as it gets in the way of my preferred desk setup.
Another supposed ergonomic benefit of the Keyboard Pro is its numpad, which 3dconnexion calls the Numpad Pro. The numpad is separate from the keyboard, which allows users to set it up wherever it’s most comfortable on the desk. In particular, by moving the numpad to the left of the keyboard, right-handed users can keep their mouse hand closer to the edge of the keys. This, according to 3dconnexion, is less fatiguing on the shoulder muscles.

I’ll give 3dconnexion credit for considering ergonomics so carefully—it shouldn’t be neglected—but for me the real strength of the Keyboard Pro is its customizability. To this end, the detached numpad gives users more flexibility in their setup. The numpad connects to the main keyboard wirelessly and has a battery that will last six months of full eight-hour work days, according to 3dconnexion. In several weeks of using the numpad, I barely saw the battery budge. It was at 51 percent out of the box. A couple weeks later it was at 47 percent. A couple days after that it was somehow back at 51 percent. The only reasonable conclusion is that I have a house elf who helpfully recharged it while I slept, via the provided USB-C to USB-A charging cable.
Customizing the Keyboard Pro
The headline feature of the Keyboard Pro is that it includes 16 customizable hotkeys, 12 above the function keys on the keyboard and another 4 at the top of the numpad. These hotkeys can be configured on an application-by-application basis. Out of the box, the hotkeys are pre-configured with common functions for many of the most popular 3D applications, including SOLIDWORKS, AutoCAD, Creo, Revit, NX, and more, as well as other standard applications like Chrome and Office.

Users customize the hotkeys via the 3dxWare driver, 3dconnexion’s free software. It’s the same software used to configure the SpaceMouse and CadMouse, and it allows users to easily switch between settings of different devices. Note, however, that you’ll need to install the latest update of 3dxWare for it to recognize the Keyboard Pro. It doesn’t update automatically. If you have a bunch of settings saved in the old version, make sure you export them or they’ll be forever lost to the Windows uninstaller.

One of the main advantages of 3dconnexion devices is that there are so many supported functions for common applications. If an application isn’t supported, users can apply generic shortcuts (such as launching another application) or define their own custom macros. Macros can include any combination of clicks and keyboard presses. There’s no easy way to edit a macro after-the-fact, however, and macros won’t transfer between applications. And, since I know you were wondering, you can’t use the hotkeys themselves in a macro to achieve recursive macro-ception.

In addition to the 16 application-specific hotkeys, both the keyboard and numpad include several global hotkeys. On the keyboard, there are four media control icons on keys F9 – F12 which are accessed by holding down the Fn key. These can be remapped the same way as any hotkey. It would be nice if there was a setting to swap the default keys, such that you could give priority to the global hotkeys and press Fn to access F9 – F12. There is no such setting, but that’s a minor complaint.

The numpad includes an additional five global hotkeys, corresponding to the equals, open and close parentheses, backspace, and delete keys at the top of the numpad.

Experience with the Keyboard Pro Hotkeys
Having 16 application-specific hotkeys at your disposal is great, particularly because they encompass so many common applications. This is a gift if you’re a power user on the prowl for shortcuts. The other nine global hotkeys, which I personally never touched, are just the cherry on top.
As much as I appreciate this aspect of the Keyboard Pro, it could use some improvement. For one thing, the hotkeys were occasionally glitchy. They didn’t work at all when I first plugged in the keyboard, but they kicked in as soon as I started customizing the keys. Another issue was that the hotkeys had trouble with certain applications. For example, this is the message I got when I opened Fusion 360:

Despite Fusion 360 being a supported app in 3dxWare, every hotkey was simply mapped to the function keys F1 through F12. I tried to remap the hotkeys, but none of the shortcuts in the Fusion 360 folder had anything to do with Fusion 360, and I got an error every time I tried to assign one.

3dconnexion’s tech support advised me to uninstall 3dxWare, clean the configuration in the Windows registry, reinstall the driver, and add it as an exception to my antivirus. Following these steps, Fusion 360 worked better, but not perfectly. I was able to configure the hotkeys for Fusion 360, but they were blank by default, and no pre-defined functions were available other than switching views (3dconnexion’s product imagery implies there should be more commands available). 3dconnexion suggested the problem may be on Autodesk’s end, as Fusion 360 recently changed how it handles the 3dxWare plug-in.

Though I never could get Fusion 360 to work as expected, most applications I tested did not have any issues and worked with the hotkeys seamlessly.
A bigger frustration of the hotkeys for me was the on-screen displays. They’re great in theory: since 16 hotkeys is a lot to remember, especially across all your different applications, 3dxWare provides two handy on-screen displays to keep track of them all—one for the keyboard and one for the numpad. These displays can be toggled on and off in the button settings for each device, and users can drag them anywhere they like around the screen.

While the on-screen displays are more or less necessary to learn what could be hundreds of custom shortcuts, the implementation of the displays is a bit clunky. The on-screen displays can be dragged anywhere on the screen, but they’ll often be in the way of something. The default spot for Windows is in the task bar, but the displays will obscure any application icons that also want to use that space. While the displays recognize the active application, they won’t switch position on an application-by-application basis, which would allow users to find the most natural spot in a given interface. The displays also remain open in full-screen apps, obscuring a portion of whatever YouTube video I’m trying to procrastinate with.

Ultimately, I found myself constantly repositioning the displays and turning them off and back on. But toggling the displays on and off is needlessly cumbersome. You have to open up the hotkey configurator and check/uncheck the box that says “Always Show On-Screen Display,” and you have to do this separately for both the keyboard and numpad displays. It takes a minimum of seven clicks. You know what would be nice? A hotkey that could accomplish this for you, but alas, no such shortcut is available in 3dxWare, nor is it possible to create one via macro.
A more minor quibble is that the look of the displays can’t be customized in any way. The light background contrasts with Windows dark mode, and you’ll just have to live with it. Furthermore, though many of the default shortcuts have icons, you can’t assign icons to those that don’t, including user-defined macros. You can name macros, but with limited space on the on-screen display not only does it look bad, it’s often unreadable.

On top of all that, sometimes the displays disappear for no discernible reason, and it can be tricky to get them back. At one point I encountered this error when trying to toggle my displays back on:

I eventually had to restart my computer to force the on-screen displays to reappear.
As much as I like the idea of the Keyboard Pro’s hotkeys, these numerous issues discouraged me from using them to full effect. Fortunately, it seems likely that all of these problems could be fixed via a 3dxWare software update at some point in the future.
Final Verdict

The 3dconnexion Keyboard Pro is well-built. It’s got a clean and professional matte black finish. It feels nice to type on and is designed with ergonomics as a priority. It’s got a ton of customization potential, including 16 application-specific hotkeys, 9 global hotkeys, and a floating numpad that’s untethered from the main keyboard. It costs $129, which is a reasonable price in line with 3dconnexion’s other products.
But the Keyboard Pro is not perfect. The keys aren’t backlit, which isn’t a deal-breaker for me but may be for some users. The numpad is wireless, but the keyboard is wired (USB-A), which is an extra cable I wish I didn’t have to deal with (however, considering every single other 3dconnexion product has a fully wireless version, I expect a wireless Keyboard Pro is forthcoming). The Keyboard Pro is also a very large device, even for a full-size keyboard, due mostly to the 3-inch palm rest and extra inch at the top for the hotkeys. I personally found it ate up way too much of my desk, but I’ve got a tight setup, so your mileage may vary.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a great experience with the Keyboard Pro’s customizable hotkeys, which for me are the main selling point of this keyboard. The hotkeys themselves were occasionally glitchy, but my bigger complaint was the clunky and unreliable on-screen displays. Even when they weren’t glitchy, they were tedious to adjust. I can’t help but think that a transparent overlay accessible via hotkey would be a much better solution.
Ultimately, I think the 3dconnexion Keyboard Pro is a solid first attempt, and a logical move for the peripheral provider. Since my biggest frustrations are with the Keyboard Pro software rather than the hardware, I’m optimistic that 3dconnexion can improve this thing quickly and freely. When and if they do, I’ll be tempted to try it again.