WhiteFox Eclipse Mechanical Keyboard with Aluminum Low Profile Case
The WhiteFox Eclipse is the first keyboard I’ve tested with such a storied history. A legacy, if you will, both to live up to and build upon.
It started out life as the Brownfox, a hand-wired custom made by Matteo “Matt3o” Spinelli in 2013. As Matt3o remarks in his own article (and my primary source of this history) 65% keyboards didn’t exist back then and he had to make his own. Brownfox was named for its brown, DSA Retro keycaps and was an extremely slick little build.
This concept later turned into the WhiteFox (named for its white keycaps), a collaboration between Matt3o, Drop and Input Club, which brought the first 65% keyboard to market- kickstarting the 65% mania. It was launched on Massdrop in 2015 and found its way toKickstarter in 2017.
The stock WhiteFox Eclipse in all its crisp and clean glory.
According to the Deskauthority Wiki, by 2018 a “TrueFox” variant of the WhiteFox could be purchased from the Kono Store.
Fast forward a little more to 2023 and Input Club comes up with the WhiteFox Eclipse, introducing an edge gasket mount, magnetic feet, hot swappable switches, Bluetooth 5.0 support and QMK/VIA. In this review I will be talking about the low-profile version. That’s low profile compared to the chunky, full-sized version. This one still comes in a solid aluminium case with full height MX-compatible switches and stands a good inch tall without the feet.
Looks ‘n’ Build
The WhiteFox is one of those keyboards I saw fly down my BlueSky Mechanical Keyboards feed. Its sleek good looks and wide design caught my eye and I knew I had to test it.
I found it in the care of Apos Audio, who appear to be the umbrella company under which Alpaca Keyboards now resides. They were happy to oblige and send one my way.
The WhiteFox Eclipse is a pre-assembled, complete keyboard that straddles the line between custom and off-the-shelf builds. At first glance its clean good looks are marred only by the baffling blue paper label on the back- mentioning projecteclipse.co- yet another name in its long and meandering history.
I don’t think much of the blue paper sticker on the back…
A closer look, however, reveals some significant wiggle in the keys, too, with many being very slightly rotated forming a distressing inconsistency in what should be a regular grid. I swapped out the keycaps – expecting those to be at fault – with KAM Astha but the wiggle was still there. The switches, then, Gateron Yellows, would be next to be implicated but… hang on… wobbly brand-name switches? I think not. A little sleuthing suggests that the switches are mounted into the plate with a little wiggle. This suggests some tolerance issue in the cutting of the plate itself. Whatever is at fault, the keys are ever so slightly wiggly and if that’s likely to grind your gears you might want to give this a miss.
Wobbley keys, these are particularly egregious and once you see them you cannot unsee…
Also counting against it is a slightly wobbly power switch, joined by wobbly magnetic feet which – while they snap very satisfyingly into their recess – have too much freedom to move and spin to feel well thought through. Wiggle and wobble seem to be the running themes here.
But there’s plenty good to say about it too, I promise!
The choice of semi translucent switches along with the plain white, flex-cut aluminium plate diffuse the lighting well and allow it to splash off the surface and provide a very uniform underglow for the keycaps. If you don’t look too closely it remains a very aesthetically pleasing keyboard. The stock pure white keycaps with blue accents really sell this well. It’s a super clean design and that was a huge part of its appeal to me, and why I’m still using it as a daily driver.
The accent blue keys are really nice and these aren’t bad caps for an out of the box complete.
The twist- I’m pretty sure- is in the plate itself or the alignment of the switches 😬
The USB Type-C connector is left-aligned so you can meticulously arrange a coiled cable behind the keyboard if you’re not taking advantage of the Bluetooth connectivity.
The whole thing has a reassuring heft and, typical of aluminium, absolutely no flex or give at all in the case itself.
Opening ‘er up
The WhiteFox Eclipse is blessed with a conspicuous lack of accessible screws, one of its many visual and functional overhauls versus the Kickstarter edition WhiteFox. In lieu of these the inside of the keyboard is stuffed to the gills with magnets which very securely hold the top plate in place.
Held together with magnets on little hex posts that screw into the plate and stick through the PCB.
These are screwed onto risers which, in turn, stick through the PCB and are bolted to the plate with some very nice, colour-matched, hex-head bolts.
The result is a keyboard that, if you tentatively grab a corner by the keycaps and pray they don’t pop off, you can pry with a little force and open like Link peering into a glowing treasure chest.
This is awesome, if of relatively limited utility, and makes it very easy to get at the underside of the PCB, or simply lift the PCB out of the base for internal acoustic mods.
Unfortunately the battery is mounted quite far to the left, leaving very little cable for opening the keyboard up or setting the PCB to one side without first disconnecting it. Other boards, such as the ND75, opt for a pull-away magnetic battery connector and that would have really fit in well here.
The whole top lifts open with a magnetic closure, but the battery cable is a little short to make this straight forward…
There’s not all that much inside the WhiteFox Eclipse, though it is dampened by a large foam insert that runs the complete width of the case with a cut-away for the battery and more for the magnets. Again there’s a small tolerance issue here, with the foam not quite fitting around some of the magnets in the top-left hand corner.
On the underside of the PCB there’s also a reset button which is opposite a hole in the bottom of the case… given the ease of opening this board, and the difficulty of finding a suitable length and thickness of pointy whatsit, I’m not sure a reset hole was quite the right choice here… but it’s not doing any harm.
This wrap around gasket is really neat, and I do actually like how this board sounds.
The PCB and plate assembly is isolated from the case with an edge gasket which runs the entire circumference of the board. It’s quite firm and doesn’t afford any cushioning, but it serves to isolate the PCB and plate from the base. The result is a generally quite nice, muted, crisp sound. In addition to the gasket, every magnet has its own foam damper to avoid them mechanically coupling to their counterparts in the base. Many of the little details in the WhiteFox Eclipse have clearly been thought through, though this makes some of the quirks more frustrating.
Software
Here’s where it gets a little dicy. I was able to request the “sourcecode” for the WhiteFox Eclipse and do some spelunking into its particulars. Perhaps unbeknownst to the person who supplied it to me, I am a programmer and knew immediately what I was looking at – a hulking great big binary blob with a bunch of cynical glue tying it into various QMK runtime callbacks. The aforementioned projecteclipse.co, a website puffing up the WhiteFox like we were still in 2018, calls the firmware “proprietary.” Indeed a large part of it appears to be so, but that’s unfortunately yet another violation of QMK’s very, very clear licensing requirements though they seem to have evaded QMK’s naughty list for now.
Suffice to say that my best efforts were not able to turn the “sourcecode” into a working firmware and not only that but every feature of the WhiteFox Eclipse was buried in the binary blob. I was blocked from even making a simple change, like disabling or dimming the always-on blue Bluetooth indicator LED on the front of the keyboard. I definitely expected better from this board in particular.
On the upside, if we could claw anything back from this, the WhiteFox Eclipse software isn’t bad. A quick tap of Fn + Tab will switch between Windows and macOS layouts, with the Insert key (very top right) becoming a tilde/backtick key – an absolute saving grace since it’s one I use an awful lot. Regrettably the macOS functions are part of the proprietary secret sauce of the WhiteFox, so you can’t do an awful lot of customisation without risking breaking them.
To their credit QMK works out of the box, but this may be due to an incomplete WhiteFox Eclipse firmware merged into QMK by a third party rather than any efforts from the WhiteFox creators.
As a final knife twist, though, that projecteclipse.co website suggests that proprietary – the rough opposite to FOSS – is better than “the gamble of unofficial fixes.” This comes from a company that was asked in early February 2024 for the ability to turn off that in-your-face Bluetooth indicator LED… this was acknowledged the same day but it’s now the end of February 2025 and no such feature – something a FOSS developer could turn around in an afternoon – has materialised.
No, no you cannot turn this off.
Cool that it’s actually another LED in the chain of presumably WS28X compatibles though. But that means even a trace cut or a PCB mod won’t stop it- without turning off all the downstream lights too.
It’s a bit ‘effin rich for a company to decry “unofficial” fixes and then do the absolute bare minimum to supply any official ones. This kind of nonsense is exactly why open source keyboard firmware is important, even while a board is still actively sold and ostensibly a going concern. Now imagine how much support you’ll get once that same board is EOL? If it’s not fully open source you are completely out of luck.
I’ve had some assurances from the folks behind WhiteFox Eclipse that the firmware is being looked into. They’re keen – it seems – to turn this keyboard into an ecosystem, and if they intend to make a big splash then keeping the software above-board – and user-customisable, like the rest of the board – should be a cornerstone of that ecosystem. They’ve been pretty responsive and quite receptive to my gentle insistence that “this ain’t right,” and thus I’m inclined to offer them the benefit of the doubt. The firmware in its current state, though, should simply not have been shipped.
Overall
It feels like the simplest way to put WhiteFox Eclipse is: a lot of good ideas, executed poorly.
The keys aren’t aligned properly, the power switch is wobbly, the battery is mounted too far from the PCB to make opening the keyboard a pleasant experience, an ugly blue paper sticker adorns the back like nobody ever loved or cared about this poor keyboard, and the software and source code availability only a notch above the very, very worst of budget keyboards espousing QMK and VIA support.
To its credit the software experience is reasonably good, with solid accommodations for macOS, Bluetooth works well, and the board name event changes to reflect the mode it’s in. It also sounds pretty great, erring toward the quiet with a distinct crisp “clack” to the keys but nothing so egregious that you couldn’t type quietly in a bedroom at night- like I’m doing as I write this.
Yeah I spilled something on my desk mat and tried to clean it how could you tell 😭
Nonetheless I can’t ignore all the little flaws that make what should be a glorious, clean little board fall short of perfection. Do I still love it? Yes. I might even go so far as to say I recommend it. But I would prefer these quirks were worked out first so I could do so with confidence.
You can pick up the WhiteFox Eclipse with Low Profile Case from Apos Audio for a very keen $145 USD, down from its $225 original price, which softens the blow of the flaws somewhat.