@decryption@aus.social well, $360 is objectively a lot for a keyboard – especially for those of us who grew up poor & will never really be able to shake all the things that flow from that experience 💁♀️
I’m interested to know which
#keeb, & what are the 🦄 features that draw you to it over other keebs 👀 (I’m not looking to dissuade you, ofc., just interested)
for me, I’ve owned multiple
#MechKeebs, but I don’t think I’ve paid more than ~$150 for any of them and most were ~$120-$130 (and I agonised over spending the money on my first one for, I suspect, similar reasons)
but I have pretty basic requirements for
#keebs:
– mech switches (or equivalents, I guess, I haven’t really strayed much from Cherry MXes)
– good switches – I’ve tried Cherry MX browns, blues, reds, & LP reds (on my portable keeb) but tend to prefer blues for both the tactility & the sound (unless I’m in an office where such noises might get me stabbed in the eye with a fork 🤪)
– decent RGB lighting (with shine-through keycap legends), both for the ~~cYb3rpUnk~~ aesthetic 🤪 & for allowing me to actually see the keycap legends[1] in suboptimal office lighting 😩
– not-shit software for setting / saving lighting profiles (I’m givin’ you side-eye,
#CoolerMaster 😮💨) OR
– decent on-keeb capabilities for setting RGB layout & profiles (which is the one area that Cooler Master[2] actually do – er, did 🪦 – pretty well)
I’m too old[3] to re-train my muscle memory to a split ortho layout, so I haven’t / won’t (? 🤔) explored that particular expensive rabbit hole…
weirdly, for whatever reason keebs are one of the few areas that I’ve been able to pretty quickly get to “this’ll do nicely, I don’t need to keep agonising over optimising this on an ongoing basis…” 🎉
1 see [3]
2 my daily drivers (home / work / portable) are all Cooler Masters at this point, with a couple of other cheapies floating around for various projects that I may or may not ever get to 🙃
3 not really 😜 but the typing performance hit is a PiTA akin to when I’ve attempted to finally become fully touch-typing capable – I was hunt-&-pecking on a terrible chiclet keyboard for my first computer, which was before I got to do a typing elective in secondary school (I fell in the gap between “teach the girls typing so they can be secretaries” & “teach all the kids typing so they can use a computer effectively” – which TBH I’m not sure we ever actually did in Aus, just somehow assuming that kids would become touch typists by osmosis like we assume that they’ll become “good at computers” or “digital natives” by repeatedly pushing buttons on their pocket rectangles until the slot-machine pays out & then just remembering the sequence of button pushes…[4])
4 …but I digress 🤪
