In light of COVID, I’ve been experimenting with my home office setup a bit and lately my target has been keyboards. When you work 40+ hours on a keyboard a week you run into issues that perhaps a more casual user wouldn’t. I’m 100% pro-mechanical myself. My favorites so far are as follows (and in order):
Das Keyboard Prime 14 with Cherry MX Brown switches USB
Corsair K63 with Cherry MX Red USB
Unicomp Ultra Classic White Buckling Spring (IBM Model M clone) PS/2
Velocifire VM01 with Outemu Brown (cherry clones) USB
What have you used, and what do you prefer? What’s your use case? I do some development and a lot of DevOps work so I spend a lot of time writing emails and config files. Do you prefer smaller form factors or a full with tenkey layout? ANSI or ISO? QWERTY or DVORAK? PS/2 or USB? Let’s geek out.
That’s a fair point - I think you’re right. I don’t believe the optimization of letters that DVORAK offers would translate to other languages. On the subject of ISO layouts, I confess I haven’t played around with them much. What changes do they offer other than a differently-shaped ENTER key over ANSI?
QWERTY on desktop and AZERTY on laptop I use both with 2 fingers
My desktop keyboard is a Dell SK-8115. I bought it for DOP200 ($4) in a local shop for 2nd hand US stuff. It works fine.
You know, for a cheap membrane that model had some good key travel. We had stacks of them at my last job and just swapped them out when they got gunky.
I have the Corsair K63 Wireless. Because it has Bluetooth, a 2.4GHz dongle, and a USB connection, I can connect it to three devices/machines. I mostly use the 2.4GHz connection for my desktop, and the Bluetooth connection for my mobile phone. It’s an ISO layout, TKL (Ten Key-Less), fitted with my favorite “Olivetti” key-caps, has Cherry MX red switches, and only has single color back-lighting (which is a blue that looks close enough to ultra-violet - so I’m hoping it kills any traces of Covid-19 that may be on my fingertips).
I seriously considered the wireless K63, but I’ve had bad experiences with wireless keyboards in the past so I ended up with the wired version. I admit, I like your blue LEDs better. Where did you get your keycaps?
I know what you mean. I generally avoid wireless keyboards too, but I wanted to try a wireless mechanical keyboard. As mentioned in my post above, I can also use this as a wired keyboard . I type quite quickly, and there have been a couple of occasions in wireless mode where 2 spaces or 2 letters have appeared when there should have only been one, but this may have been me (this is very rare).
I didn’t like the blue back-lighting until I replaced the majority of the black keys with gray ones, now I love it (for some reason). I think I got these dirt cheap from Ebay: https://bit.ly/2WNSWLH
I have a Logitech K810 too. It’s bluetooth, and it never misses a beat. Very disappointed the K810 was discontinued. I usually carry it with me when traveling so I can use it with my phone (I use the Juice SSH client).
HyperX Alloy FPS Pro. I went tenkeyless because I had very limited desk space at the time I bought it. I was going to go with Cherry MX Browns, but this model with Blues went on a very good sale, and so far, I am loving it. It is my first mechanical keyboard.
Just received my Razer BlackWidow Lite. It’s okay, but nothing to write home about. Can type very quickly on it (love the Razer orange switches), but it feels kinda cheap as it’s made of plastic. I guess this is to keep the weight down if traveling with it. It was on special on the Microsoft store (£63). Really glad I didn’t pay £100 for it (which is what it was retailing for two days ago).
One of the immediate advantages over my K63 - this thing has very fine grain control over the back-lighting. On my K63, you have two options: “very bright”, and “burn your retina bright”.
I still prefer Cherry MX brown or red switches, the Razer orange switches feel quite scratchy in comparison.
Just ordered this bad boy with Kailh Box Navy Thick Clicks and an MDA Big Bang Keycap Set. I will be installing a pair of Adafruit neoPixel Rings for RGB underlighting. I will be using a custom layout (QWERTY based).
. I type quite quickly, and there have been a couple of occasions in wireless mode where 2 spaces or 2 letters have appeared when there should have only been one, but this may have been me (this is very rare).
