Driver

Cherry's driver for the KC 1068, as well as a few other Cherry peripherals, is called KeyMan (Key Manager, not to be confused with another general keyboard tool of the same name), the installer of which can be downloaded over this link by entering the product name in the search bar. As with other instances, I found the driver to be compatible by trying it out as there is little mention of it anywhere and customers would be excused for missing it completely. Cherry needs to do a better job with this unless they intend for the driver to not be used at all on purpose. The installer is in German, so just follow through on what I did above (I mostly picked the default options) and make sure to enable the English-language option in the download section if you do not speak German. There are other languages to choose from as well, as seen in the installation GIF above, so only select a language if that is all you want, which will make things easier for you later on. The installer and installed driver both are very lightweight on storage and CPU/RAM resources.


Once installed, I recommend heading directly to the install directory to open the "keymanconfig" application and not "keyman", which is just a background process that runs after installation and does not need to be re-initiated, as warnings in German will tell you each time. The driver has not been updated in two years, but supports Win 8 64-bit, and there is no issue with running it in Win 10 64-bit. It scales well with OS-level display scaling, so those with a high resolution monitor should be able to make out what is being displayed, which is unlike some company solutions we have seen before.

Here is a look at the driver's functionality in action, as I go through its available options in the menu, key assignment for the function keys, and the four extra buttons on the keyboard (volume control + home/Win lock). The driver saves the key assignment functionality to the device as far as I can tell, but I do not know yet if there is a limit on how much can be stored—the length of a macro recording, for example. Regardless, the addition of this driver increases the keyboard's functionality tremendously for office work and beyond, and I really do not know why Cherry did not market this as a big feature for the keyboard. The user interface is not very intuitive, however, and looks dated for even office keyboards such as this one.