7 ms·

The Problem with Mechanical Switch Reviews (2016)

55 points by signa11 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago
But isn't the trouble with that that the thing we really want to measure is "I like typing on this keyboard?"
- CarVac 5y ago
  Yes, but you can judge based on force curves to compare switches you have tried to switches you haven't.
- notacoward 5y ago
  I think the point is to be able to predict the answer without actually trying it. If I know I like X and Y, and I can see that Z has a very similar force curve, then it's likely to satisfy one of my preferences. I might have others - e.g. sound and key spacing - but that just suggests other measurements that should also be made. Having more detailed/accurate force measurements still seems like a good thing.
  - taneq 5y ago
    Exactly, and this is increasingly important given how often we have to buy these things online without trying them first.
- klyrs 5y ago
  I want to know "will I like typing on this keyboard" without buying it first. I can't tell that from reading a dozen reviews, because people love that clacky IBM keyboard that drives me up the wall. Keyboard enthusiasts are not to be trusted. Graphs give me a much better idea of what I'd actually be getting.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    I agree with your point, but: > Graphs give me a much better idea of what I'd actually be getting The issue with that is that you "have to have the feel" for the graph. Except for extreme circumstances, if you're not familiar with how to approximate the feel from the graph, it won't really help you. I guess my point is that you still have to have some kind of actual, real-world experience. In my case, I kind of deduced that I liked "bumpy" switches, so I went the "brown" route. I was happy with my Gateron Browns. When I wanted a second keyboard to not haul the first around, I figured Cherry Brown would be "close enough". They supposedly have the same specs and everything. Nope. They feel much "harder" to press. I do like them enough, so I didn't send the KB back. But I do tend to miss some keys when I switch from Gateron to Cherry, and I do tend to press like crazy on the Gateron after switching from the Cherry.
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      The graph itself has an absurd number of variables. Graphs don't have a natural ordering, though you could make one such as "area between the up and down curves". My pet peeve is fat fingering. To first order I think any keyboard sucks if I am afraid to use the backspace or home button because I risk toggling the "insert/replace". The force curve might have something to do with that, you might also take some objective measurements about the key layout that are predictive of that, but I could waste a huge amount of time trying out "bad" keyboards without prediction of my personal fat finger rate.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      > The issue with that is that you "have to have the feel" for the graph This is true; it takes time and effort to understand anything quantifiable once it's been quantified. As somebody with extensive experience with math and physics, I didn't really grok the force/displacement plots on first glance. So, I read the axes. That got me most of the way there. Then, I looked at the force/displacement plots of various keyswitches, and reflected on my own experience with keyboards from clacky to mushy. So, yes, you do need actual real-world experience with keyboards. With that experience, and the skill of reading a plot, you can get a good sense of what to expect without actual real-world experience with this specific keyswitch. Got me curious, because cherry browns are considered "lighter" than gateron browns. Looking at the data, they take less force to register a keypress, but more force to bottom out. So, that's a perfect example of why you can't trust individual reviewers: some are interested in getting a keypress, some are more focused on bottom-out force. https://input.club/the-comparative-guide-to-mechanical-switches/tactile/gateron-brown/ https://input.club/the-comparative-guide-to-mechanical-switc... https://input.club/the-comparative-guide-to-mechanical-switches/tactile/cherry-mx-brown/ https://input.club/the-comparative-guide-to-mechanical-switc...
CarVac 5y ago
"total force" should be "total work"…
g3ol4d0 5y ago
error 402 "This embedded plot has reached the maximum allowable views given the owner's current subscription." :c great reading tho
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Yes, not a good look from plotty and SaaS in general.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    Yes it's a nice illustration why you should not use a SaaS like plotly, especially considering that there are many options out there which could have put the plot into the post directly.
    - pc86 5y ago
      At the very least it's a nice illustration of why you can use plotly but just take a screenshot and post that.
    - alanbernstein 5y ago
      I hate to defend plotly, because this is awful. But you can also embed interactive plotly plots, rather than depending on their service.
- nickstinemates 5y ago
  What a terrible service
- notThrowingAway 5y ago
  The HN hug-of-death at work
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Maybe, although since the post is from 6 years ago, it might have been hugged to death already years ago.
szastamasta 5y ago
I think that it’s not really possible to conclude anything from the force charts. Switch feel is so much more than amount of resistance spring has. I’ve been testing switches that should be very similar according to charts, yet they felt totally different. I think there are plenty factors at play here. Spring resistance, wobbliness of the switch, activation distance, feel of the tactile bump/click… Recently I've been using Otemu brown, violet, and orange and Gateron browns. All should be quite similar, yet in the end they feel totally diferent. I love Otemu oranges and dislike brown and violet. Gateron browns feel very good, but a bit wobbly for my taste. I have tested more than 20 switch types, and most of my guesses based on someone else opinion or specification were usually wrong. The only thing I know is that I want tactile switches, with rather low activation force. Except of that, I have no idea if I'll like the switch or not. I like the way that author approaches this, but I'm not sure we can conclude anything from a scientific approach here. Switches are just like art or music. Sometimes you like a song you think you should hate. Yet it makes something to you and you just can't stop listening ;)
- layer8 5y ago
  What’s worse, you need to swap the switches for the whole keyboard (or at least a significant portion) to effectively test them. Just getting single sample switches doesn’t really tell you how a whole keyboard of them will feel.
323 5y ago
Getting strong audiophile equipment review vibes :) Did anyone do a blinded mechanical switch ABX test? I bet most would fail to differentiate except between the major categories - linear, buckle, dome, ...
- notacoward 5y ago
  > Getting strong audiophile equipment review vibes From the OP, or from the discussion here? Serious question. Because it's genuinely not clear which you mean (for me it's the latter).
  - 323 5y ago
    In general, from the whole "mechanical switches" industry. OP is fine, he's measuring things. The audiophile industry also always includes "frequency response" graphs and all kinds of other measurements in their reviews, yet the whole field is still a bit of a sham.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  This is closer to musician instrument preferences. The audio component of switch mechanics isn't as important to me as the tactile experience. Tiny changes in the springs can be felt, your keys will feel too weak or stiff. The mechanics of the switch will feel broken, wobbly, or tight. Check out high end electric pianos at your local music shop, and compare to $100 Wal-Mart kid keyboards. The resistance and smoothness and feedback from the keys integrate with muscle memory better (and in the case of pianos, graduated activation helps determine the volume of a note and sustain.) I don't know if typing with good switches helps with rsi, but it certainly helps with comfort and satisfaction. A good clarinet or trumpet or saxophone will have similar features to the feel of different types of mechanical keyboard switches. Sure, you can play decent music on cheap mass produced elementary school instruments, but it's going to objectively feel better playing a high end bespoke instrument. No jarring or disruptive aspects in the motion to interfere with the process of putting characters on the screen.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
CyberShadow 5y ago
One rather un-obvious property of most mechanical keyboard switches made today is that the tactile feedback actually does not match the actuation point - meaning, the point at which the switch "clicks" is not the same point where the PC starts registering the keypress. In fact, in e.g. Cherry MX switches, these two are handled by separate mechanisms! The only switch type where actuation == tactile feedback that I know of is buckling-spring, as in the IBM model M. This realization was a big moment of disillusionment in (most) mechanical keyboards for me :)
- Aloha 5y ago
  I've been laughed at by mechanical keyboard purists, but I have modern model m's on my desk for this reason.
- __alexs 5y ago
  There are beam spring based switches that also have this property. There are even some MX keycap compatible ones available now but I think they are all require a hall effect PCB. I guess some clicky optical switches may also behave this way?
- tshaddox 5y ago
  As far as I can tell, this is an intentional part of the design of the Cherry switches and is desired by many fans. It personally has never bothered me, even with Reds which don’t really have a tactical feedback point.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  Personally, I like this. I've since gone linear, but, when I was a fan of tactile keys, my favorites were the ones that placed actuation just before tactile feedback. That allowed me to type much more lightly, because I only had to press enough to get to the leading edge of the tactile bump. I did once love my Model M, but it's more tiring to use than newer keyswitch designs are. Pushing enough to actuate the key means building up enough force to buckle the spring, at which point there's not really anything I can do to avoid bottoming out. It's sort of the double IPA of keyswitches: really, really, really good in small doses, but not necessarily something you want to be experiencing for 8 hours straight.
notThrowingAway 5y ago
Plotly graphs seem to work on the archived page: https://web.archive.org/web/20220426140006/https://input.club/the-problem-with-mechanical-switch-reviews/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220426140006/https://input.clu...
minerva23 5y ago
Why sum the force curve and ignore the activation point? In an extreme example, if it activates at 0.1 and the force required increases 10 fold at 0.2, the the force from 0.2…4.0 obviously doesn’t matter (because the user would feel the force increase and stop pressing).
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: The Problem with Mechanical Switch Reviews - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13006608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13006608 - Nov 2016 (5 comments)
amelius 5y ago
Measuring only force, and not sound?
Sunspark 5y ago
I have had exposure to multiple different switch types over the years, not as many as enthusiasts however. Personal preference being expressed here, while I can and have used buckling springs at length, they are not my favourite for two reasons. One, they click twice. Once when actuating and once again on the way back up so they are 2x as noisy. Two, they have a fair bit of resistance. Really, likely the best way to type on a buckling is to push down and let the key push your finger back up. It can be tiring, especially if you're not imprinted on this way of typing. My favourites are complicated ALPS. Yes, I know they are no longer made with the exception of simplified whites (from Matias), but I have a lot of exposure to ALPS and am actually typing this on complicated orange ALPS right now. You can look at force curve graphs, but the typing experience is very different compared to buckling. When you press the key (the travel needed to actuate is not as far either compared to buckling), you get one click not two. The key does not need to push your finger back up because it's lower force, so when you hear or feel the click your finger can already be swinging away to another key. MX is not as good as ALPS, but it has a large market share. Just like VHS wasn't better than Beta, but won anyway.
- Blackthorn 5y ago
  I miss ALPS switches. They were absolutely the best. MX is no better than nice rubber dome in my mind (which I use today) while being much less reliable.
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    So why not get some Matias switches (3 to choose from), or a keyboard then? You can buy a switch tester from them and see if you like the feel of this implementation of it. It's too bad they don't send it out with some random keys attached as an option. https://matias.store/ https://matias.store/ If you don't want to bother with the tester, the grey quiet-click are roughly equivalent to cream dampeneds and are good for use in an office environment so that neighbours don't burst into tears at your acoustic assault in the open-concept floor plan. If this isn't an issue and noisier/bouncier is more fun, then white is what you want. Tai-Hao also sometimes makes ALPS keycaps.
- 5y ago
kkfx 5y ago
Not intending to be rude but... My own main personal problem is not much in switch terms but in the keyboards they are in: - most can't be easily reprogrammed and some with only some programmable keys demand extra software at runtime to work; - most are just designed out of IBM PC classic keyboard changing just the look&feel from one to another, there is exactly ZERO competition in keyboard features behind aesthetic/visual aspects/colorful backlit etc; - keys tend to be smaller and narrow than the past, I suppose to save plastic for the OEM, nothing really for the end user; - Cherry profile &c makes impossible to move keycaps freely around the keyboard (classic IBM parabolic design, with is very simple actually can perfectly: all keycaps are physically identical). To be less off-topic: switches soldered in ways that's hard substitute them at home if some breaks after a bit of time. Switch with different keycaps connectors just to create incompatibility between vendors and no standard to rescue... Long story short: real tactility and force might be interesting to discuss and compare people taste on those topics, noise levels are another topic, but the above issues well... Are IMO far more crucial and still ignored by most...
- yeahboats 5y ago
  Have you looked into the various builds on r/ergomechkeyboards? A lot of custom layouts/pcbs, most all with hotswap switches and running QMK, which should let you keep your custom keys on device and not needing any software at runtime. (You'll have to program the firmware at some point though.) I went with one that had a build service as I didn't feel comfortable soldering just yet. Only downside is that cases can be a little unrefined and it's easy to get expensive quickly as they are more niche builds.
  - dendriti 5y ago
    There are tools such as VIA which handle firmware for you, so you can just change a key in the GUI.
  - kkfx 5y ago
    Yes, but all share a common pattern: they try to be as small as possible. My personal vision is that OEMs have well sold "small is better" to spare materials and sell them at a higher price... I'm living in Emacs (EXWM), with a binding strategy of a bind a single key hit or a mod+key because even with more spatial movement I'm still quick and with less mental context switch/overhead to move in space vs using "more mods"/keyboard layers or key chords... In the past SUN Type 6 alike keyboards suffice, nowadays it's hard to find anything and start my own design demand simply too much time and effort to achieve daily usage quality for my tastes. That's about me of course, but the rant is in general: in the past some companies, even journals,have asked for custom keyboards to be more efficient, now the focus is just on consuming devices instead of producing ones. That's alarming IMVHO and worth to debate beside the rant...

55 points by signa11 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago

But isn't the trouble with that that the thing we really want to measure is "I like typing on this keyboard?"

CarVac 5y ago
Yes, but you can judge based on force curves to compare switches you have tried to switches you haven't.
notacoward 5y ago
I think the point is to be able to predict the answer without actually trying it. If I know I like X and Y, and I can see that Z has a very similar force curve, then it's likely to satisfy one of my preferences. I might have others - e.g. sound and key spacing - but that just suggests other measurements that should also be made. Having more detailed/accurate force measurements still seems like a good thing.
- taneq 5y ago
  Exactly, and this is increasingly important given how often we have to buy these things online without trying them first.
klyrs 5y ago
I want to know "will I like typing on this keyboard" without buying it first. I can't tell that from reading a dozen reviews, because people love that clacky IBM keyboard that drives me up the wall. Keyboard enthusiasts are not to be trusted. Graphs give me a much better idea of what I'd actually be getting.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I agree with your point, but: > Graphs give me a much better idea of what I'd actually be getting The issue with that is that you "have to have the feel" for the graph. Except for extreme circumstances, if you're not familiar with how to approximate the feel from the graph, it won't really help you. I guess my point is that you still have to have some kind of actual, real-world experience. In my case, I kind of deduced that I liked "bumpy" switches, so I went the "brown" route. I was happy with my Gateron Browns. When I wanted a second keyboard to not haul the first around, I figured Cherry Brown would be "close enough". They supposedly have the same specs and everything. Nope. They feel much "harder" to press. I do like them enough, so I didn't send the KB back. But I do tend to miss some keys when I switch from Gateron to Cherry, and I do tend to press like crazy on the Gateron after switching from the Cherry.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    The graph itself has an absurd number of variables. Graphs don't have a natural ordering, though you could make one such as "area between the up and down curves". My pet peeve is fat fingering. To first order I think any keyboard sucks if I am afraid to use the backspace or home button because I risk toggling the "insert/replace". The force curve might have something to do with that, you might also take some objective measurements about the key layout that are predictive of that, but I could waste a huge amount of time trying out "bad" keyboards without prediction of my personal fat finger rate.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    > The issue with that is that you "have to have the feel" for the graph This is true; it takes time and effort to understand anything quantifiable once it's been quantified. As somebody with extensive experience with math and physics, I didn't really grok the force/displacement plots on first glance. So, I read the axes. That got me most of the way there. Then, I looked at the force/displacement plots of various keyswitches, and reflected on my own experience with keyboards from clacky to mushy. So, yes, you do need actual real-world experience with keyboards. With that experience, and the skill of reading a plot, you can get a good sense of what to expect without actual real-world experience with this specific keyswitch. Got me curious, because cherry browns are considered "lighter" than gateron browns. Looking at the data, they take less force to register a keypress, but more force to bottom out. So, that's a perfect example of why you can't trust individual reviewers: some are interested in getting a keypress, some are more focused on bottom-out force. https://input.club/the-comparative-guide-to-mechanical-switches/tactile/gateron-brown/ https://input.club/the-comparative-guide-to-mechanical-switc... https://input.club/the-comparative-guide-to-mechanical-switches/tactile/cherry-mx-brown/ https://input.club/the-comparative-guide-to-mechanical-switc...

CarVac 5y ago

"total force" should be "total work"…

g3ol4d0 5y ago

error 402 "This embedded plot has reached the maximum allowable views given the owner's current subscription." :c great reading tho

speedgoose 5y ago
Yes, not a good look from plotty and SaaS in general.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Yes it's a nice illustration why you should not use a SaaS like plotly, especially considering that there are many options out there which could have put the plot into the post directly.
  - pc86 5y ago
    At the very least it's a nice illustration of why you can use plotly but just take a screenshot and post that.
  - alanbernstein 5y ago
    I hate to defend plotly, because this is awful. But you can also embed interactive plotly plots, rather than depending on their service.
nickstinemates 5y ago
What a terrible service
notThrowingAway 5y ago
The HN hug-of-death at work
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Maybe, although since the post is from 6 years ago, it might have been hugged to death already years ago.

szastamasta 5y ago

I think that it’s not really possible to conclude anything from the force charts. Switch feel is so much more than amount of resistance spring has. I’ve been testing switches that should be very similar according to charts, yet they felt totally different. I think there are plenty factors at play here. Spring resistance, wobbliness of the switch, activation distance, feel of the tactile bump/click… Recently I've been using Otemu brown, violet, and orange and Gateron browns. All should be quite similar, yet in the end they feel totally diferent. I love Otemu oranges and dislike brown and violet. Gateron browns feel very good, but a bit wobbly for my taste. I have tested more than 20 switch types, and most of my guesses based on someone else opinion or specification were usually wrong. The only thing I know is that I want tactile switches, with rather low activation force. Except of that, I have no idea if I'll like the switch or not. I like the way that author approaches this, but I'm not sure we can conclude anything from a scientific approach here. Switches are just like art or music. Sometimes you like a song you think you should hate. Yet it makes something to you and you just can't stop listening ;)

layer8 5y ago
What’s worse, you need to swap the switches for the whole keyboard (or at least a significant portion) to effectively test them. Just getting single sample switches doesn’t really tell you how a whole keyboard of them will feel.

323 5y ago

Getting strong audiophile equipment review vibes :) Did anyone do a blinded mechanical switch ABX test? I bet most would fail to differentiate except between the major categories - linear, buckle, dome, ...

notacoward 5y ago
> Getting strong audiophile equipment review vibes From the OP, or from the discussion here? Serious question. Because it's genuinely not clear which you mean (for me it's the latter).
- 323 5y ago
  In general, from the whole "mechanical switches" industry. OP is fine, he's measuring things. The audiophile industry also always includes "frequency response" graphs and all kinds of other measurements in their reviews, yet the whole field is still a bit of a sham.
robbedpeter 5y ago
This is closer to musician instrument preferences. The audio component of switch mechanics isn't as important to me as the tactile experience. Tiny changes in the springs can be felt, your keys will feel too weak or stiff. The mechanics of the switch will feel broken, wobbly, or tight. Check out high end electric pianos at your local music shop, and compare to $100 Wal-Mart kid keyboards. The resistance and smoothness and feedback from the keys integrate with muscle memory better (and in the case of pianos, graduated activation helps determine the volume of a note and sustain.) I don't know if typing with good switches helps with rsi, but it certainly helps with comfort and satisfaction. A good clarinet or trumpet or saxophone will have similar features to the feel of different types of mechanical keyboard switches. Sure, you can play decent music on cheap mass produced elementary school instruments, but it's going to objectively feel better playing a high end bespoke instrument. No jarring or disruptive aspects in the motion to interfere with the process of putting characters on the screen.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

CyberShadow 5y ago

One rather un-obvious property of most mechanical keyboard switches made today is that the tactile feedback actually does not match the actuation point - meaning, the point at which the switch "clicks" is not the same point where the PC starts registering the keypress. In fact, in e.g. Cherry MX switches, these two are handled by separate mechanisms! The only switch type where actuation == tactile feedback that I know of is buckling-spring, as in the IBM model M. This realization was a big moment of disillusionment in (most) mechanical keyboards for me :)

Aloha 5y ago
I've been laughed at by mechanical keyboard purists, but I have modern model m's on my desk for this reason.
__alexs 5y ago
There are beam spring based switches that also have this property. There are even some MX keycap compatible ones available now but I think they are all require a hall effect PCB. I guess some clicky optical switches may also behave this way?
tshaddox 5y ago
As far as I can tell, this is an intentional part of the design of the Cherry switches and is desired by many fans. It personally has never bothered me, even with Reds which don’t really have a tactical feedback point.
mumblemumble 5y ago
Personally, I like this. I've since gone linear, but, when I was a fan of tactile keys, my favorites were the ones that placed actuation just before tactile feedback. That allowed me to type much more lightly, because I only had to press enough to get to the leading edge of the tactile bump. I did once love my Model M, but it's more tiring to use than newer keyswitch designs are. Pushing enough to actuate the key means building up enough force to buckle the spring, at which point there's not really anything I can do to avoid bottoming out. It's sort of the double IPA of keyswitches: really, really, really good in small doses, but not necessarily something you want to be experiencing for 8 hours straight.

notThrowingAway 5y ago

Plotly graphs seem to work on the archived page: https://web.archive.org/web/20220426140006/https://input.club/the-problem-with-mechanical-switch-reviews/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220426140006/https://input.clu...

minerva23 5y ago

Why sum the force curve and ignore the activation point? In an extreme example, if it activates at 0.1 and the force required increases 10 fold at 0.2, the the force from 0.2…4.0 obviously doesn’t matter (because the user would feel the force increase and stop pressing).

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: The Problem with Mechanical Switch Reviews - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13006608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13006608 - Nov 2016 (5 comments)

amelius 5y ago

Measuring only force, and not sound?

Sunspark 5y ago

I have had exposure to multiple different switch types over the years, not as many as enthusiasts however. Personal preference being expressed here, while I can and have used buckling springs at length, they are not my favourite for two reasons. One, they click twice. Once when actuating and once again on the way back up so they are 2x as noisy. Two, they have a fair bit of resistance. Really, likely the best way to type on a buckling is to push down and let the key push your finger back up. It can be tiring, especially if you're not imprinted on this way of typing. My favourites are complicated ALPS. Yes, I know they are no longer made with the exception of simplified whites (from Matias), but I have a lot of exposure to ALPS and am actually typing this on complicated orange ALPS right now. You can look at force curve graphs, but the typing experience is very different compared to buckling. When you press the key (the travel needed to actuate is not as far either compared to buckling), you get one click not two. The key does not need to push your finger back up because it's lower force, so when you hear or feel the click your finger can already be swinging away to another key. MX is not as good as ALPS, but it has a large market share. Just like VHS wasn't better than Beta, but won anyway.

Blackthorn 5y ago
I miss ALPS switches. They were absolutely the best. MX is no better than nice rubber dome in my mind (which I use today) while being much less reliable.
- Sunspark 5y ago
  So why not get some Matias switches (3 to choose from), or a keyboard then? You can buy a switch tester from them and see if you like the feel of this implementation of it. It's too bad they don't send it out with some random keys attached as an option. https://matias.store/ https://matias.store/ If you don't want to bother with the tester, the grey quiet-click are roughly equivalent to cream dampeneds and are good for use in an office environment so that neighbours don't burst into tears at your acoustic assault in the open-concept floor plan. If this isn't an issue and noisier/bouncier is more fun, then white is what you want. Tai-Hao also sometimes makes ALPS keycaps.
5y ago

kkfx 5y ago

Not intending to be rude but... My own main personal problem is not much in switch terms but in the keyboards they are in: - most can't be easily reprogrammed and some with only some programmable keys demand extra software at runtime to work; - most are just designed out of IBM PC classic keyboard changing just the look&feel from one to another, there is exactly ZERO competition in keyboard features behind aesthetic/visual aspects/colorful backlit etc; - keys tend to be smaller and narrow than the past, I suppose to save plastic for the OEM, nothing really for the end user; - Cherry profile &c makes impossible to move keycaps freely around the keyboard (classic IBM parabolic design, with is very simple actually can perfectly: all keycaps are physically identical). To be less off-topic: switches soldered in ways that's hard substitute them at home if some breaks after a bit of time. Switch with different keycaps connectors just to create incompatibility between vendors and no standard to rescue... Long story short: real tactility and force might be interesting to discuss and compare people taste on those topics, noise levels are another topic, but the above issues well... Are IMO far more crucial and still ignored by most...

yeahboats 5y ago
Have you looked into the various builds on r/ergomechkeyboards? A lot of custom layouts/pcbs, most all with hotswap switches and running QMK, which should let you keep your custom keys on device and not needing any software at runtime. (You'll have to program the firmware at some point though.) I went with one that had a build service as I didn't feel comfortable soldering just yet. Only downside is that cases can be a little unrefined and it's easy to get expensive quickly as they are more niche builds.
- dendriti 5y ago
  There are tools such as VIA which handle firmware for you, so you can just change a key in the GUI.
- kkfx 5y ago
  Yes, but all share a common pattern: they try to be as small as possible. My personal vision is that OEMs have well sold "small is better" to spare materials and sell them at a higher price... I'm living in Emacs (EXWM), with a binding strategy of a bind a single key hit or a mod+key because even with more spatial movement I'm still quick and with less mental context switch/overhead to move in space vs using "more mods"/keyboard layers or key chords... In the past SUN Type 6 alike keyboards suffice, nowadays it's hard to find anything and start my own design demand simply too much time and effort to achieve daily usage quality for my tastes. That's about me of course, but the rant is in general: in the past some companies, even journals,have asked for custom keyboards to be more efficient, now the focus is just on consuming devices instead of producing ones. That's alarming IMVHO and worth to debate beside the rant...