Comment by qball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qball | Hacker News Reader

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>we’re going even further backward with the mechanical keyboard obsession

Well, not quite; single-stage/two-stage trigger technology, as well as progressive triggers, have some benefits when applied to keyboards.

First, single-stage/two-stage triggers give you (with single-stage) a single smooth press with activation point somewhere in the middle, or (with two-stage) a consistent amount of takeup then a wall that you have to break through to activate the mechanism. So you can have the key pressed and resting on the activation point, and then press it the rest of the way when you want the input to register (for instance, if you're in a game and are waiting for someone to peek around the corner).

Second, progressive triggers, where pressing a little way registers a single input and pressing it all the way down/back types something fully-automatically. They're still mostly useless because the manufacturers refuse to put properly heavy springs in the switches, but the technology itself is ready for this.

It's certainly strange that it took 70 years from the implementations of these ideas in firearms to today's keyboards given the advantages of each mechanism are equally applicable to both, but that's the way it happened.

First, single-stage/two-stage triggers give you (with single-stage) a single smooth press with activation point somewhere in the middle, or (with two-stage) a consistent amount of takeup then a wall that you have to break through to activate the mechanism. So you can have the key pressed and resting on the activation point, and then press it the rest of the way when you want the input to register (for instance, if you're in a game and are waiting for someone to peek around the corner).

This is a cool thing, I’d want that on my mouse triggers also. The problem is that in practice it’ll never be what we want it to be because the distance of switches is too small to make that two stage thing be a thing (we’d need super heavy switches for this to be a thing). Now imagine mouse clicks which are supposed to represent a trigger (we operate as if everything is a hair trigger).

Burst/Single burst is mostly a timing thing at this point. Would be interesting to see it become a force based thing.

Fun ideas though.

>Now imagine mouse clicks which are supposed to represent a trigger.

Interestingly, some consoles already do this- the PS5 in particular will vary the weight of its shoulder triggers to match what you're doing on screen.

>we’d need super heavy switches for this to be a thing

It continuously surprises me that none of the Hall effect keyboard makers (Wooting, Drunkdeer, and... I think Steelseries and Corsair have some as well) don't offer ultra-high-weight springs as at least an option for this reason.

Interestingly, there's another keyboard manufacturer, Roli, who makes a board that has some very interesting modes of input (as they accept inputs of variable pressure, give you the ability to slide smoothly between keys, and vary the kind of input from each key by shaking your fingers). Of course, that's not a computer keyboard, but it's still a glimpse into the kinds of interesting input devices we could make if only we bothered to do so.

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