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Comment by stasomatic | Hacker News Reader

I think that Keychron is a meme brand surfing on the long tail of custom drops. I have a couple of them a Q1 Pro something, a K* whatever. They are just decent keyboards, a middle of the road. The constant accidental invocation of flashing lights is annoying and then you have to cycle through the presets. Not unique enough for geeks. Their marketing is good.

My Moonlander is gathering dust, can't find time to put it up on Ebay. Bought it 3 years ago, used for a week. QWERTY is hard to quit. I like the EPOMAKER Magicforce Smart2 68-Key layout [0] . No QMK, but I get by with Karabiner, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0836T2Y17

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You can disable the invocation of the lights.

Fn + L + Light button for 6 seconds for the K series.

YMMV depending on the exact model.

https://keychronsupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052...

Their low profile keyboards are unmatched IMHO. Nothing has hit the balance that they have.

approaches manaskarekar with slow deliberate steps

stands before manaskarekar

clasps manaskarekar upon both shoulders

gazes into manaskarekar

softly smiles and subtly nods at manaskarekar

releases clasp and worm-dances back into the desert

You need a cape! And my bad for not RTFMing or searching their site. All three of my K series now blissfully dark. Thank you kind person.

Also their he magnetic sensor keyboards are awesome especially for the price

Keycron are middle of the road decent keyboards, but they are priced much lower then other comparable ones. This makes them much more then a meme brand.

Perhaps "meme" was a wrong choice of words. What I wanted to say, I think, is that they are overrepresented in review coverage than they deserve. Good for them, they are decent keyboards, I didn't say they weren't.

This is why i buy them. With the latest keyboards putting the usbc port on the left side *n a protected sunken enclosure they got good enough to use at wotk and i now have 70 or so of them deployed there to nearly uniformly rave reviews

Their low profile keyboards are some of the best available. "Standard" full size mechanical keyboards is a a pretty crowded market with literally thousands of products that aren't that differentiated.

Agreed. I bought my low profile keychron k3 pro, I believe it was, several years ago and I'm really happy with it. No complaint whatsoever. I bought the equivalent with full layout for my wife a couple of years ago and she's really happy with it too.

I don't think I can move away from low profile mechanical keyboards with programmable firmware like QMK now. I'm too used to my Keychron

Theres nothing about the moonlander that forces you to not be QWERTY though, and I'd bet most people are in fact on QWERTY with it.

Do you mean hard to quit staggered keyboards? As in the rows dont line up in a grid.

Personally I've been using ortholinear boards for over a decade to the point that its quite the opposite problem, it feels so unnatural to have to move your fingers in such directions. Sometimes there is just no home row quite like a 48 key planck's.

Do you mean hard to quit staggered keyboards? As in the rows dont line up in a grid.

Perhaps. But also, during my 3-4 day infatuation phase, I spent too much time screwing around with remapping and thumb keys and layers with zero to show for it. I do not blame ortho/Moonlander/staggered, this was on me. I am a victim of having too many choices.

I also realised that qwerty will always be required. So I use colemak-dhm on split-columnar-blank-keycap keyboards with less keys and qwerty on unibody-rowstaggered-printed-keycap full-size keyboards. It helps my brain to switch.

It is very similar to using both bikes, ebikes and motorcycles all having different controls. Your brain can have different muscle memory if it thinks of them as different things.

They have silent keyboards in full size and TKL, with Hu layout. It is really silent, with butterfly mechanics, and was ~50€ with VAT included!

Had a slight bug that the kbd didn't wake until first mouse click, when machine woke from sleep, but a recent receiver firmware update solved it. It is great value for the buck. It is very hard to find really silent keyboards, especially in ISO layouts, and there they have it. Is it customizable? Only in software. Does it have trendy clicky keys or fancy keycaps? No. Is it good for my work, when I sometimes have to work late and not disturb my family? It is great!

ps: I'm not at home, I cannot recall the model, I don't really care for this stuff, this is exactly what I wanted: an unnoticable workhorse with good price-performce .

> QWERTY is hard to quit

Is your moonlander not QWERTY? Can’t you just change the layout, if not? Or do you mean the Ortholinear layout is hard to get used to?

I’ve been wanting to buy a moonlander…

I think he meant that the left side has QWERT and the right one has the Y

It's both the ortho and the split. The Moonlander is a very nice keyboard, it's worth its BOM, I was simply impatient. I bought it for the cool factor on a whim without realizing time investment required. My email is in my profile, I'm in the states.

Mine is plugged in but not that used yet. Same deal its hard to change habits. I also find it slightly too big for my hands especially with the mouseball added. Its sad because it feels so qualoty and the ideas are awsome just my habits are slowing my adoption

You sound like me. Same gripe about my Keychron, same Moonlander gathering dust that I keep meaning to do something with...

I mentioned it to the person you’re replying to but if you’re in the USA and considering. in offloading the Moonlander I’m interested. My email is available in my profile.

Agree, not much special about them, and I truly hate their keycap profile which I find to be way too tall. They’re not bad keyboards, and regularly on sales in the 40-60% range for many of their boards, it’s just that they’re not great either, middle of the road so to say.

I had keyboards upwards of $200 with a very nice design but they have their Bluetooth switch underneath the keycaps ... and usually don't ship ISO versions. What keychron is delivering for the price is just amazing.

Hmu (email in profile) if you’re in the US and want to get rid of the moon lander; I really enjoy my Voyager want to try out the Moonlander.

That EPOMAKER reminds me of my Leopold Topre keyboard.

Avoid EPOMAKER, they are super buggy in my experience (losing connection, requiring weekly reflashing of firmware).

Mine hates the P button. Sometimes it will not react to it. Sometimes It wil repppeat it two or three times. But I love the aesthetic of the pastel colors, the volume sphere is cool and the typing feeling is great. I dropped my keychron k2 and it stopped working via usb, but charging still works. If I were able to fix it maybe (maybe) I'd switch back to it, in the end I prefer having a reliable keyboard.

> I like the EPOMAKER Magicforce Smart2 68-Key layout [0] . No QMK, but I get by with Karabiner, etc.

Many Epomaker boards are just licensed to be sold under their brand name, most of them fairly transparently. (Ie. Epomaker x Aula, Leobog etc.)

Quite a few of their configuration software packages end up looking quite horrible as a result, as I don't believe they have a unified software package for all the brands they sell. Many Windows Forms looking programs that look like a time machine back to the era of Windows XP.

Unfortunately they've also been caught up in quite a few scandals over the years: QMK license violations Customer support/Quality control issues Attempts to dodge customs by deliberately under-declaring the value of their packages... Got into a legal fight when another company also licensed an identical board design and beat them to market (The other company aren't angels either) Platform banned from Reddit for astroturfing

Which kind of just results in Epomaker in being a hard discourage.

At the time I purchased the one I linked to, it was sold under Qisan brand. I don't have any brand loyalty to either them or the Epomacher, I just prefer this specific "MagicForce 68 Smart" build - the layout, the quality, that it's only white backlit. It is really made well. If you can live without the F row, it's a great keyboard.

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