The little red Trackpoint nubbin has been a fixture of ThinkPad-branded laptops since 1992, but I never knew until recently that both IBM and Lenovo made standalone mechanical keyboards with this extra input device too. Of course, those haven’t been made for a quarter of a century, but it’s actually still possible to find keyboards that sport it – and, in fact, surpass the original in terms of quality.
It was the expiry of the patent for the Trackpoint in 2017 that let the many-named “pointing stick” reappear in nicer mechanical keyboards – including the HHKB Studio that I tested last year.
The most promising examples though come from Tex, an obscure Taiwanese keyboard manufacturer founded to revive the classic ThinkPad-style keyboard in a fully-fledged mechanical style – and in multiple layout configurations to suit modern tastes, from compact 65 percent arrangements to the full seven-row madness. What I ended up testing is the Tex Shinobi, a curious keyboard that looks exactly like the bottom half of an old-school IBM laptop – but feels quite different.
The Shinobi is one of the brand’s first forays into this weird and wonderful world, and it’s based on the ThinkPad SK-8855 model from the late 2000s. It’s also one of the more ‘affordable’ options in the brand’s range, though it’s still nearly £200/$200. That’s a huge amount of money, but surprisingly less than the typical £250 asking price of an original SK-8855 in 2025.