The Ars Technica guide to mechanical keyboards | Hacker News Reader

The Ars Technica guide to mechanical keyboards

arstechnica.com

19 pointsTomte8 comments

Please, please, function keys on the left! Nobody's interested in them anymore--but they're still useful for some of us. I can reliably touch-type function keys on the left, I can't with the ones above the keyboard, and when they need to be in combination with other keys also it's even more of an issue.

I have never seen a keyboard as good as the old Northgate Omnikey Ultra. Please resurrect the king!

Only if the Fn key is configurable. Nothing worse than having an entire key on the bottom left dedicated just to media controls as they often are.

The average user has little need of function keys. The guys who use keyboards a lot (which is probably the majority of people who will seek out and pay the price for mechanical keyboards) often use software that has stuff mapped to those function keys.

Recently I switched to a Logitech K380, a tiny thing with quiet, soft and effortless keys. I suppose it's the complete opposite of a mechanical keyboard.

https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/k380-multi...

It's more complex than simply "soft and effortless". For fast accurate typing, many typists need activation feedback and the absence of a hard stop. Mechanical switches have a range of force curves to choose from. The force curve of this Logitech is unknown (and probably unknown even to Logitech).

If I had to use this device, I probably couldn't type all day. For me personally, an ergonomic mechanical keyboard is pretty essential.

This guy types. Much more eloquent than I am in expressing the importance of a mechanical keyboard.

Effortless is not the issue. A clear sensory indication that you actually pressed the key is what's important. Yes, a quiet electronic keyboard takes less finger movement and less finger effort--but the effort for the mechanical isn't enough to matter and the mistake rate is a lot lower.

One of those soft electronic keyboards--say, the one on my laptop--and I don't dare think while my hands are on the keyboard.

TKL definitely needs to be the new laptop standard.

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