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Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

I do not understand the hobby around mech keyboards at all. It reminds me a lot of other activities/sports where the gear becomes more of a focus than the activity itself. Reminds me of photography or paintball. Dudes will have thousands of dollars of gear and use it 3 times a year.

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I do not understand my coworkers who spend 8 hours a day typing on a shitty membrane keyboard. It's they job and their main interface to the computer and they are totally oblivious to it. They also use no shortcuts at all. I've seen some use the mouse to copy/paste...

I don’t know, unless the keyboard was truly awful I probably wouldn’t complain and just get to work on the task at hand. Then again, I started typing when I was a small child, used what was available, and at the time there wasn’t the level of keyboard choice there is today. Nor did I have the money to indulge in it if there were. I can definitely see the logic people employ to justify it. It’s the same logic used to justify a nice bed, shoes, etc.

For me, it has very practical reasons.

If you work in software, you'll spend 6-10+ hours a day interfacing with the machine via your hands.

So of course, the quality of that experience matters. Each person's fingers and typing styles are different to degrees so finding the right fit requires sampling. You often require a few days or even weeks to adjust and get a feel if a keyboard is right for you. I've had keyboards that only surfaced fatigue after a month of use.

I've accumulated keyboards mostly in search of the perfect one that can prevent fatigue, pain, and injury for a job that requires 1/3 of my day to be attached to a keyboard.

Yea, there is a large portion of the MKB population which is engaging in consumerism as a hobby.

I do think ergo keyboards can help a lot when you have RSIs or other physical constraints, but I think 90+% of the people who are MKB enthusiasts could be just as productive interfacing with a computer using a $20 Microsoft OEM keyboard.

I use an Apple magic keyboard for work and I don’t think it really slows me down. I could maybe see if you are a writer and you are outputting thousands of lines a day a good keyboard could make a difference, but if you are writing that many lines of code you should be concerned that LLMs are going to take your job writing boilerplate.

Just give me two monitors, a stock install of Ubuntu, and any $20 keyboard and I can do anything.

I'm up to roughly 40 boards at this point. I use two of them basically daily - my desktop and laptop dock.

I tend to rotate them a few times a month. The hobby is about the gear, but the people that get really deep into it tend to be building them to fit a specific aesthetic - people make custom keycap sets, complete with graphic novelty keys, etc., for all sorts of themes, from food, to anime, to space, and everything in between. And people design the keyboard cases for just as many themes. Mine sit on stands in my office as decoration - I enjoy looking at them the same as I enjoy using them.

I am at the keyboard 40-80hr per week.

I want a keyboard that is ergonomic and pleasant to use.

Me, I was forced to use a model M for several years and threw it to the trash the moment I realized I could plug any shitty membrane keyboard bought in random stores. These "vintage" fashions usually come and go for either unexplainable reasons or just flimsy warmness/feeling arguments. Like vinyl, instant cameras or the like. Notice in all of these one almost always spends thousands of dollars and yet end up with objectively worse sound/image reproduction. It is not nostalgia, since it often involves people who never used them back in the day. Or maybe that actually explains why they buy them.

The hobby is a spectrum. Compare r/ErgoMechKeyboards vs r/MechanicalKeyboards. You can easily avoid the “look how much I spent” part of the community.

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