Comment by schwartzworld | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schwartzworld | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I probably don't speak for everybody, but I can try to speak to your points above:

- They are loud

They can be loud, depending on the switches you get. However, some people feel that they benefit from it. The loud clicks are satisfying in some way. Maybe it's an ASMR thing for some people. For me, the sound feels like feedback.

- They are expensive

They can be. But so can regular keyboards. My first mechanical was like $40.

- The keys are massive and ugly

Unless you put low profile switches on your keyboard

- Massive travel time (So slow to type on)

Unless you put fast switches on your keyboard. The clickiest keys tend to be the slowest, but I don't type more than 80 words per minute anyway, and when I'm coding a lot less than that. But you can definitely get faster switches.

Here's another reason: it's fun. It's just fun. Sure maybe it's just cosplaying as a hacker, but it's still fun.

And most mechanicals can be remapped really easily, to allow custom workflows. Or layers. What I may potentially lose in words per minute, I gain by creating an intuitive key map that lets me reach the keys that I actually need day to day.

> They can be loud, depending on the switches you get.

It’s worth noting that for folks who don’t know proper typing technique (which is probably nearly everybody under the age of 40, as nobody really teaches it any more, at least in the countries where I’ve lived) it almost doesn’t matter what sort of mechanical switch you’re using, in terms of noise.

In my experience, the majority of mechanical keyboard noise for most folks doesn’t actually come from the switches at all; it comes from the keys noisily bottoming out on each keystroke.

My theory is that most folks these days learned to type on membrane keyboards where you have to bottom out the keys (often with quite a lot of force, if the keyboard is old), or else on a laptop’s scissor switches where you can’t avoid bottoming out due to the extremely short throw, and so everyone’s just typing with much more force than necessary and driving the keys all the way down to the backplate on every press because that’s what they had to do with the keyboards they learned on.

Which of course makes typing far less pleasant, and also much noisier! The complaints are totally understandable, from that perspective.

This also links into the “Massive travel time” comment; most folks push the keys much too far down while typing on mechanical keyboards!

Cherry MX Blue switches (as one example) actuate at 2mm, which is almost exactly the same distance as most (non-Apple) laptop scissor switches. The only reason that a mechanical keyboard would have “massive travel time” compared to a laptop keyboard is if you’re needlessly pushing the keys all the way down, when you actually only need a gentle tap on them.

That's the exact reason I use mechs. My finger joints started getting sore from typing, which was a career threat for me. I bought a collection of nice keyboards with Cherry browns and reds, and trained myself to type without bottoming out, and the problem went away. As a bonus, it turned out that typing that way was faster for me.

For several years, sometimes I slacked off and just typed on my Mac keyboard, and fingers would start getting sore again so I'd switch back to the mechs. Now I've apparently healed up a bit and a modest amount of laptop typing doesn't bother me, but I still bring out the mechs for more substantial work.

It is difficult to unlearn once you learn it incorrectly.

I have learned to touchtype about 80WPM in my teens, over 2 decades ago and I still have hard time not bottoming out or using right shift key.

I have been successful in re-learning to use dvorak instead of qwerty and to type in a tempo (ie. with equal intervals, using metronome), but the bottoming dynamic is much more basic than that, I think.

Agree. Older-than-40 here, I learned to type primarily on electric typewriters and old-school terminal keyboards, where the switches would trigger around half-way down the travel of the key. When I use a mechanical keyboard, I do the same- the Cherry MX Clear switches in my keyboard act in a similar way- you don't need to "bottom out" a switch for it to activate.

Manual typewriters, though, had a /huge/ amount of travel, and since the travel provides the force to strike the type on to the paper, you really had to hammer on them.

> Older-than-40 here, I learned to type primarily on electric typewriters and old-school terminal keyboards

Came here to say the same thing. But then I was stuck on keyboards that required bottoming out for many years. It's been a re-learning process to not bottom out on my fairly keychron k2. But, wow so pleasant to use.

This matches my experience as well. It’s really hard to break the habit of typing super hard.

This is partly why I really like my Zilent switches. The tactile bump is at the top of the keypress, so you can let up as soon as you're through it. Cherry tactile switches require pre-travel.

> My theory is that most folks these days learned to type on membrane keyboards where you have to bottom out the keys (often with quite a lot of force, if the keyboard is old)

I hate this. It's uncomfortable. If you aren't old enough to have used a good laptop before laptops could be thinner than two inches, you can think of modern laptop keyboards as the 21st century equivalent of a girdle. You give up a certain amount of comfort, but hey, at least you look sexy.

I guess we won't have comfortable laptop keyboards again until the electronics and battery are small enough to fit entirely under the palm rests and trackpad.

> If you aren't old enough to have used a good laptop before laptops could be thinner than two inches, you can think of modern laptop keyboards as the 21st century equivalent of a girdle

I miss old laptop input devices, wish someone still made a laptop with a built in trackball too!

I never got to try a trackball. I remember that touchpads back in the day were garbage compared to touchpads now, though. I remember the Thinkpad nub was better than any touchpad I ever had until I got my first Macbook Pro. The Apple touchpads were so amazing I assumed they would eventually figure out keyboards, too. Still waiting ten years later.

It's not too late! Thinkpads still come with a nub.

I tried to use the nub thing once since I have a Thinkpad through work. Really not to my taste.

It takes a while to get used to. The biggest value add for me with the nub is scrolling while holding the middle button. I love that.

There are plenty of trackballs available to plugin, just not anything mainstream in a laptop.

I personally would love a return to keyboards at the front edge of the laptop, with a side mounted trackball; but I doubt I'll see that.

Oh baby https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Ma...

That's pretty awesome. Although I was thinking of something more like the Microsoft Ballpoint Mouse https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=22...

https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform

> the 21st century equivalent of a girdle. You give up a certain amount of comfort, but hey, at least you look sexy.

My wife does a lot of sewing and garment making. She has convinced me that a properly designed and fitted girdle is actually a net-benefit for people. The trouble is proper fit is hard at a mass scale, which is why women transitioned to bras, which also have notorious fit issues, but are at least manageable when mass produced.

I've ordered an opti-mechanical new laptop to hopefully rediscover comfort in typing. Wish me luck)

I didn’t realise this when I started using keyboards with Cherry MX switches and bottomed out the keys. Noisy, slow, probably not great for my wrists!

I eventually realised that you’re supposed to press them gently, like you might with a camera shutter, just past the actuation point. Now I type faster, it feels better, and it’s really quiet.

> the majority of mechanical keyboard noise for most folks doesn’t actually come from the switches at all; it comes from the keys noisily bottoming out on each keystroke.

There are silicon o-rings that you can place around the stem peg of the keycap. It's like a $15 mod, takes about maybe a half-hour for a whole keyboard. It will definitely dampen the sound of the key bottoming out and will be a lot quieter and remove the blunt "shock" in your fingertips of bottoming out.

> and so everyone’s just typing with much more force than necessary

This is interesting!. I learn typing in a VERY old mechanical typewriter, then in an electronic one, then in a computer keyboard.

You need to hammer the keys in the old typewriter, like hitting with all the force in the world. But in the electronic it was so soft! Then the computers come and was like in the middle.

I made my own mechanical keyboard, and looking at it, I bottom up around the "middle", not going full force. Also, I HEAR if I hitting it too hard, so I can "lower" the sound mid-tipyng! Cool to have feedback!

I took my typing class in 1983 junior high.

There were two IBM Selectrics in the back of the room, and everything else was manual. There was a schedule for the lucky two.

I think we had more than one Apple ][ for after-school signup at that point, but I'm not sure.

I'll avoid dating myself, but let's just say I took typing class around the same time you did. Classroom had 20 IBM Selectrics. I was the only male in the class and probably the only student who wasn't in the Business/Accounting track (I was in College Prep and they couldn't figure out why I would take the class since professionals at the time had a secretary type all their correspondence). I foresaw that it was going to be a valuable skill because I was also in my school's first computer science class. None of the guys, and they were all guys, in my comp sci class could type, they were all hunt-and-peck.

So I learned the traditional way with an egg timer and a spiral-bound exercise book on a stand. Curled fingers. I still type this way, and I can still do about 170+ wpm depending on how many cups of coffee I've had.

Later, this really helped me when I got an IBM Model F keyboard or Sun UNIX keyboard and when I would fly around Vi like a keyboard assassin it would amaze my colleagues. My current keyboard is a mechanical Ducky with Cherry MX Brown switches: https://www.duckychannel.com.tw/en/Ducky-One-Golden-grey-TKL

170 is insane. I have similar history and top out at 88wpm @ https://play.typeracer.com

Practice helps, but you can probably increase your speed by learning not to bottom out the keys with every keystroke. Cherry Browns help because they have a tactile 'bump.'

> everyone’s just typing with much more force than necessary and driving the keys all the way down to the backplate on every press

After getting a mechanical with high force keys (80g) and learned to type without bottoming out I find with every key press you get a bounce back, a bit of energy that sustains typing. It's like tiptoeing on a trampoline.

One other thing I like about mechs is that you get to feel the center of the keys, as they have a small depression in the middle. this helps align hands to the buttons and reduces mistyping. Flat and crowded laptop keys bad with centering.

I did not know you could get low profile keys. That's interesting and I'll look into that. Why aren't they the default though?

But even with everything you say, I still don't see the point. You'd have to find specific switches and keys (which will probably be more difficult to find and more expensive) just to end up with something that roughly matches a rubber dome keyboard.

And yeah, I admit they look cooler overall. And they have a more "hacker" vibe to them which I can appreciate. But again I still can't think why I'd spend all that extra money/effort on something that struggles to match a normal keyboard for typing.

And yeah, when I'm coding I hardly type, I spend most of the time thinking. But I still do a lot of typing in general. Writing online comments, group IM chats, searching stuff on the internet, typing commands into a terminal. And whenever I've tried any of that on a mechanical keyboard, it just feels like my typing speed is unnecessarily slowed down. I get irritated by the latency in the same way I get irritated waiting for a website to load all it's useless extra js scripts that will have no effect on the bit of text I want to read.

- Why aren't [low profile key caps] the default though?

I can't say. I came to mechanical keyboards to get away from the crappy Apple laptop keyboards, so would never occur to me to use key caps like that.

- You'd have to find specific switches and keys (which will probably be more difficult to find and more expensive)

Have to? Or get to? Sourcing parts for your dream keyboard can be fun. At least as fun as any other hobby. At the end of the day, if you like the keyboard you're using, you're doing it right.

The one thing I will say, is that my fingers probably touch my keyboard more than any other item in my house. I'm a developer and I might spend hours straight at the computer. When you consider that, the $150 I spent on my keyboard or the $99 I spent on my trackball don't seem like so much money.

Low profile mechanical keyboards seem to be pretty slim pickings, still. https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k1-wireless-mecha... is one of the first I saw gain pretty wide popularity.

I bought the K3 from them (low profile, 75% layout) and I gave it an honest shot for a few weeks, but before long just went back to an Apple Magic Keyboard. I liked the feedback, but the travel was still longer, the keys were much louder, I wasn't a fan of the layout, and frankly, I just prefer chiclet keys. I really wanted to like it, but after that experience and working with another, more traditional mechanical for a while before it, I just cannot imagine using them for day-to-day development work.

The K3 was about as close to a replacement for the Magic Keyboard that I have found, though. It's a good keyboard and if I wasn't so used to and familiar with the Magic Keyboard, I probably would have loved it. I just think the Magic Keyboard is better for my preferences.

I'd had my eye on the K1 and now the K3, and have hesitated for the reasons you cite: at the end of the day, flattening a mechanical keyboard just feels like incompletely reverting back toward what is admittedly the superior typing experience of the Apple Magic Keyboard.

I'm actually typing this on a Keychron K2 version 1 with Gateron brown switches, and it took a few weeks of trial and error as well as a wrist pad to be able to type anywhere near the comfort and speed of what had worked for me for years (but seemed like a recipe for disaster): hunched over my laptop's built-in keyboard and display at a standing desk, no external monitor or keyboard needed or desired.

Infuriatingly, the Keychron series' spacebar is noticeably longer than on Apple keyboards. The Keychron spacebar partly overlaps X and comma, whereas Apple keyboards for as far back as I can recall are exactly aligned with the outer edges of C and M. I also miss the Fn at far lower-left of Mac keyboards.

> The Keychron spacebar partly overlaps X and comma,

This was part of my "wasn't a fan of the layout" comment. The alignment of the X and Comma with the Command key, which is a key your thumb reaches to a thousand times a day, is so much more comfortable than any other keyboard I've found. And it really created some strain for me on the K3. I also wasn't a fan of the right shift being shorter to make room for the full size arrow keys (I'd rather have a tenkeyless or, preferably, the half-height keys on Apple keyboards) or of the function key on the right.

Really, I just wanted the Apple Magic Keyboard, the 60%/65% one, with a more tactile feel to it and preferably in black. I've looked at dozens of keyboards over the last 8 months and the K3 was the closest I found. So I'm just going to stick with the Magic Keyboard.

I just bought the K2 v2 about a month ago and it's pretty great. From what I've seen, they updated the design so that it wouldn't be as flat. You can change the height of the back so it slopes better. I don't find myself needing a wrist pad.

Still getting used to it over the Magic Keyboard though.

Another option is getting speed switches like Cherry's speed silver or Kailh's Copper/Bronze/Gold. They're the same size as normal switches and support the same keycaps, but you only need to press them halfway compared to how far down you need to press other switches to activate them. Some even have a shorter activation distance than the one you linked.

Keyboards are recipes with varying proportions of ergonomics, style, DIY “hacking” ... depending on the person.

It’s an accessible hobby, requiring less time, skills and resources than drone racing or woodworking...

So you don’t “have to” spend money if it does not scratch an itch nor bring any satisfaction.

Fashion aside I love those small grid programmable keyboards. I don’t care too much about style, though my wife loves the plank ez “discokeyboard” as she says.

>Why aren't they the default though?

Historical reasons, I believe. Computer keyboards started out as typewriter keyboards modified to work with mainframes, and the typing experience was something that keyboard designers put some effort into recreating when designing things like the DisplayWriter or model f keyboards.

Personally, I hate low profile keys, but that's a matter of taste. It probably has to do with the fact that I learned to type on an IBM selectric II; still the best typing experience I've ever had, by far.

This is not strictly a feature of mechanical keyboards, and sure you can often do some limited remapping in sofware, but enthusiast keyboards tend to have a wider variety of layouts as well. IMHO everyone who uses the Ctrl key on a regular basis should try remapping Caps Lock as Ctrl for a day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com