Mechanical Keyboard Autism Thread - Because Cherry MX switches get you laid.

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Vic Viper T301 said:
Way back when Starcraft 2 came out I saw people hyping up mechanical keyboards and I dropped about $100 on one. Can't remember the brand as this was a decade ago. It was good for about a month, then I started getting phantom inputs, took me a long time to realize because it was so random that I thought I was going crazy but I was eventually able to confirm it by seeing keys I clearly wasn't hitting popping up when I was typing in Notepad. Got a refund and bought a replacement for $10 on Amazon, which I am using to type this post. Never saw a reason to switch. I guess my keyboard autism is not so strong.
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I think it's partly to do with how much typing you do. I do a lot of typing and having a keyboard that feels good and sounds nice is conducive to my health. also alps are super responsive for gaming.
 
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Two lovely keyboards in my life:
A generic Chinese metal body with clone MX Blues and a custom WASD Keyboards keycap set in old terminal-like colors, and...
The fantastic buckling springs on my IBM Actionwriter 1 typewriter. It has a DIN port on it that from what I understand was used to connect to an original IBM PC to use it as a shitty daisy wheel printer, but I've never seen one of those adapters anywhere. But it's a pretty neat, heavy old typewriter.
 
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A while back, I picked up what I fully expected to be a shit-tier Blackweb "mechanical gaming keyboard" from Walmart for my desk at work.
fb5a44bd-169b-4495-ab57-3966093652c4_1.334f3f7bc22d4755013e078f26030f7f.jpeg

It turned out to be pretty incredible for the ~$40 I paid, and I was considering picking up a second one for home when I saw one in the clearance aisle for like $5.

Needless to say, I bought that sumbitch right away, and now have two of em. For the money, I'm honestly blown away. Highlights:
  • The chassis is solid metal
  • The chord is cloth-wrapped, and has held up very well to less than optimal interactions with metal desk parts over the last few months
  • The switches are half way decent Cherry Blue clones (Otemu Blues iirc), so they have a pleasant feel/sound, and I can swap out the key caps.
  • The wrist wrest screws on but can be removed if needed, plus when mounted it's on a flip hinge and tucks away nicely under the keyboard. so it'll stay put or get out of the way as needed.
  • The chipset being used seems to be the same one used in some other budget boards, so there are a few undocumented features (Fn + F1-12) for shortcuts and media controls
  • It has several lighting patterns/animation options, with controllable brightness.
  • You can lock the Windows key via shortcut
The only cons are that it doesn't have any macro/layer functionality, the cable is non removable, and it's got that non-changeable rainbow lighting scheme.

I've got a mechanical numpad on its way to use as a macro board, and I've been considering opening the thing up to see if I can hack in a removable cable.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I just discovered the other day that the switches in this thing are hot swappable as well.
 
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Wow - definitely an amazing score for $5 let alone 40. Did they have many on clearance?
 
I'm using a HyperX alloy origins core TKL with red switches, and it's my forever keyboard now. It's fully machined aluminium top and bottom so if anyone burts into my room I can smack them on the head with it and go back to typing without breaking a sweat. RGB backlighting is the brightest I've ever seen and I love the floating design, very minimalist and elegant.
 
Sgt. Pinback said:
Wow - definitely an amazing score for $5 let alone 40. Did they have many on clearance?
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I think I grabbed the last one, sadly. At that price I would have stocked up!

AmpleApricots said:
why would anyone want their keyboard to light up like a gay disco
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My thoughts exactly, but it's a small price to pay for an otherwise fantastic keyboard.
 
That Acorn KB looks pretty good. Very reminescent of the Performa/Quadra-era Apple ADB keyboards with Alps switches. Comfy, quiet, mechanical. Gray. You can't do any better nowadays.

Apple keyboards were good even after they went to membranes. The OG iMac keyboards were better than anything you'd get with a PC.
 
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SSF2T Old User said:
idk bout other "gamer" keyboards but mine has the option to change it to one solid color that doesn't flash. It's pretty convenient for "night typing" if you don't want to turn the lights on.
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Sadly that one only lets you change the flashing patterns; the lights are always a rainbow.

(Mine has total light customization, so I went completely autistic and set it up to only light the keys I need for gaming and the colors correspond to a type of function, e.g. A-S-W-D are blue because they're directional movement; shift, control, and space are yellow because they're positional movement and I'm going to stop typing now because I sound incredibly nerdy...)
 
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Was out of the mechanic keyboard game for about a decade. Came back and GeekHack had rotted away with most of the userbase running to Reddit. Speaking of which, if you want to see high-level nerd shit, go to /r/MechanicalKeyboards. It's just a weird rabbit hole - a lot of the boards there aren't even usable, with "designer" keycaps on common keys sticking up a good 1/2" above the rest, purely for aesthetics. Some have extremely small footprints with certain keys hidden behind "layer" buttons.

One good thing to come out of all this are custom boards. Essentially you can completely assemble your own boards now, all the way from a (mostly) bare PCB to programming the actual controller. Of these, the split ergonomic boards have my interest:

ergo.jpg


This is one of the more common designs, popular enough for them to be available for custom order so you don't have to assemble everything yourself - the Ergodox EZ.

The most obvious difference (besides the split) is the offloading of more work to the thumb. Seems like a pretty big learning curve to go through while also learning split. There's similar boards that are only sold as PCBs that look similar and have a thumb cluster, but I'm not sure the time and effort needed to source the parts would be worth it. Has anyone tried one?
 
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I've got a Model M i use for work and a corsair strafe with cherry blue switches, i can't stand mechanical keyboards without a very tactile click
 
Win98SE said:
Was out of the mechanic keyboard game for about a decade. Came back and GeekHack had rotted away with most of the userbase running to Reddit. Speaking of which, if you want to see high-level nerd shit, go to /r/MechanicalKeyboards. It's just a weird rabbit hole - a lot of the boards there aren't even usable, with "designer" keycaps on common keys sticking up a good 1/2" above the rest, purely for aesthetics. Some have extremely small footprints with certain keys hidden behind "layer" buttons.

One good thing to come out of all this are custom boards. Essentially you can completely assemble your own boards now, all the way from a (mostly) bare PCB to programming the actual controller. Of these, the split ergonomic boards have my interest:

View attachment 1462097

This is one of the more common designs, popular enough for them to be available for custom order so you don't have to assemble everything yourself - the Ergodox EZ.

The most obvious difference (besides the split) is the offloading of more work to the thumb. Seems like a pretty big learning curve to go through while also learning split. There's similar boards that are only sold as PCBs that look similar and have a thumb cluster, but I'm not sure the time and effort needed to source the parts would be worth it. Has anyone tried one?
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If you can't type with your thumbs already why do you even have them? It looks pretty nice and I have been thinking about going back to mechanical because I want to know/feel/hear that an input registers the correct amount of times without looking at the keyboard or the screen.
 
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Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
If you can't type with your thumbs already why do you even have them? It looks pretty nice and I have been thinking about going back to mechanical because I want to know/feel/hear that an input registers the correct amount of times without looking at the keyboard or the screen.
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'Back'? What happened to your last mech keyboard?
 
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