Mechanical Keyboard Rabbit Hole
A Keyboard's a Keyboard, No Matter How Small
I haven’t written about the tools of my trade in awhile, which I realize is an oversight given that you have enjoyed previous posts on pens and pencils. Honestly I barely even write with those things. Who has time for dragging some kind of Victorian-era implement across a stack of dead trees? Not me. Cuneiform might even be faster. If you’ve got that kind of time why not send a smoke signal?
I save articles like this for when I don’t have any deep insight or thoughts about anything so that’s what’s on deck today. I hope you enjoy deep dives into stuff you don’t care about at all because that’s what this is. Welcome to my article on mechanical keyboards.
Please note for the record that I am absolutely the wrong member of my social circle to be writing this article. Pretty much all my friends know more about mechanical keyboards than me. But I’m the one with the newsletter and 1850 words to fill so I’m what you get.
It’s not that I don’t do any longhand writing. I enjoy journaling—bullet journaling, longform journaling, laboratory notebooking—which I do with both a pencil and a pen. But for writing anything of real substance—anything meant to be read by a person other than myself and perhaps a graduate student doing a very obscure doctorate in about two hundred years—I have to write on a computer. I have to have my very specific setup. A specific writing suite, a specific scented candle, and a very specific type of keyboard. The loudest one you can find.
Naturally, the first pro of using a mechanical keyboard for writing is that everyone in your household will know when you are writing because they can hear you. A lot of articles will tell you that the loud clacking is a downside of having a mechanical keyboard but that’s why you come to Shelf Life, I give you the real story. The spicy take you won’t get anywhere else.
You have a keyboard. Don’t we all? You’re not special. Everyone has that closet full of old keyboards that aren’t quite broken enough to throw away. Do you know what kind of keyboard you have, though? There are two main kinds out there, mechanical keyboards and membrane keyboards. A membrane keyboard has a membrane over the circuits and you type a letter by pressing down on the membrane over the circuit and the contact between the membrane and circuit tells your keyboard to input a letter. There are usually plastic keycaps overtop of the membrane so you can’t necessarily tell you have a membrane keyboard by looking. A lot of membrane keyboards have keycaps. It’s just that underneath the keys is a plastic sheet and that’s what the keys press on when you tap them.
A mechanical keyboard has keycaps over mechanical switches with metal springs that connect directly to a PCB (that’s a printed circuit board for anyone who hasn’t lived the tragedy of being married to an electrical engineer). As you can imagine, metal parts are going to last way longer than flexible rubber or plastic parts. Further, hitting a key that is directly connected to a switch to the PCB is way more precise than hitting a switch that presses down on a plastic web that then contacts the PCB.
Mechanical keyboards are usually good for ten or more years, and you can easily replace individual keycaps and switches as they wear out rather than chucking the whole thing and replacing it. They’re good for tens of millions of key presses. A membrane keyboard, on the other hand, usually lasts one or two years of heavy usage and around five million key presses. People who use computers for work, writing, and gaming press thousands of keys per day. I haven’t logged myself but I’m probably in the 12,000 to 15,000 presses-per-day range, given that I have a computer-intensive job, and then a writing-intensive side hustle, and then gaming as a hobby.
If you consider Vimes’s Theory of Boots (thanks Terry Pratchett), knowing the price range of a decent membrane keyboard is $20 to $70 and the price range for a decent mechanical keyboard is in the $100 to $300 range, it’s obvious that the mechanical keyboard is already a more economical purchase. You should definitely get one, even before I start to go into the reasons why the mechanical keyboard is better to use than the membrane keyboard.
Look, I know I said being loud is a feature and not a bug but they aren’t all as loud as mine. Get one with brown switches and nobody will ever know you’re not using the crummy $20 Logitech you got from Bezos’s House of Garbage.
The thing about mechanical keyboards is that as soon as you purchase one and realize that you love it, you spend about fifteen seconds doing the smallest modicum of research and realize that you should definitely have built your own. I’m just telling you that up front to save you the grief. You’re not going to take this advice and later you’ll wish you did. Bet on it.
Keyboard Size
Most of the keyboards you see if you aren’t a giant nerd are probably full-size, TKL, and compact keyboards.
Keyboard size is also commonly written as a percent, with the full-size, 104-key keyboard being 100 percent. This is the keyboard that has all the keys. I had a hard time getting my mind around the fact that keyboards have 104 keys (some have up to 108, which is even more wild, like 4 percent more wild) when there are only twenty-six letters and ten numerals. I know there are other keys like the F keys that I never actually use and a bunch of ancillary keys like “enter” and “delete” but how do you get from 36 characters to 104 keys? That seems profligate. (If you agree that it is excessive, there are a lot of keyboards out there for you that I will discuss below). This keyboard notably has the number pad, which I cannot live without for reasons I do not understand.
It’s also worth mentioning the 1800 layout, which has all the keys of a full-size keyboard but squished together to take up less space. This is America, home of the sprawling front lawn and the SUV, but I guess some people might want this keyboard layout.
The TKL (“tenkeyless”), with 87 or 88 keys, is your 80 (or 87) percent keyboard (depending on who you ask). This one is like the full-size keyboard but the number pad is missing (so it is completely unsuitable for anything unless you add a macro pad). The numpad has 17 keys, 104 minus 17 is 87, that’s your 87 percent keyboard and all the math I will do this entire year, all in one sentence.
The compact, or 60 percent, keyboard, is the one you are likely to see on a small laptop or Chromebook. It doesn’t have anything to the right of the enter key (no arrows or numpad) and it doesn’t have any keys above the number line (no function keys).
In addition to those standard sizes, you can get mechanical keyboards down to 40 percent. A 40 percent keyboard has only the alphabet and some function keys that allow you to have layered uses for each key. What this means is . . . you can make the keyboard anything you want.
Special Configurations
In addition to the “normie keyboards” above, there are additional special configurations that you can buy or build. The ortholinear (“ortho”) keyboard has all of the keys in neat, aligned rows instead of staggered. A split keyboard has the keys split into two groups, one for the left hand and one for the right hand—they may be on unconnected bases or they may be set in two groups into one base.
A macro pad is the really interesting piece of keyboardistry for writers, artists, and others who use a lot of special characters or specialized commands or hotkeys. A macro pad is a small, separate, extra keypad that you can customize to contain any keys you use frequently but that don’t appear on a regular keyboard. At the top of my wishlist would be the em dash—surprising no one—so I can insert an em dash with one press instead of five. The lowercase e with accent aigu is another one that would save me a lot of extra keystrokes over time. If you go looking, you can find really cool, prefabricated macro pads for all kinds of things.
Build Your Own
The beauty of the mechanical keyboard is that you can make it your own by designing a keyboard that has everything you need and nothing you don’t use. If you don’t use the numpad, go smaller than 100 percent. Don’t use the F keys? I never use the F keys. Go smaller. Want some extra hotkeys? Make your own labels and program your own keyboard.
Kits
If you don’t have a desire to go completely custom but you still want to build your own, you can start with a kit. A kit will include the top case and bottom case, a PCB, and may also include your keycaps and switches.
Keycaps
Keycaps come in different profiles like “Cherry” and “DSA.” The profile of the keycap is its shape based on what row of the keyboard it sits on. Are all the keys the same? Or do keys have a different shape based on row? Do they have a high profile (taller keys)? Or a lower profile? Is the top surface of the keycap flat? Or does it conform to the shape of a fingertip? These are all considerations that affect how you type, so take a look at the keyboard that you use regularly and get a sense of what you’re already used to and whether that’s something you want to stick with or change.
You can also find all kinds of novelty keycaps that do not have the standard approximate square shape—round, horseshoe, and other shapes are out there. These are cool to look at but they are not great for precision typing. Invest in an extra backspace key if you go for a set of keycaps with a novelty shape.
Switches
The switch is underneath the keycap and connects directly to the keyboard’s PCB. The switches define the sound, feel, and responsiveness of the keyboard. They can come in linear, clicky, and tactile types.
Tactile: You feel a bump on the way down when you press the key.
Linear: You do not feel a bump when pressing the key. These are the most responsive.
Clicky: A bump and a clack sound when you press the key (obviously best, loud keyboard is life).
If you go with a clicky switch, the switch you choose will also determine how loud the click is. You will often hear people referring to mechanical keyboard switches by color, which refers to the range of switches made by Cherry MX. For example, the Cherry MX brown switch is tactile and quiet, while the Cherry MX blue switch is tactile and loud, and the Cherry MX red and silver switches are linear and favored by gamers. Linear switches require the least pressure to activate a keystroke so they’re probably also more ergonomic. Don’t quote me on that. Listen, never quote me on anything.
If you have ever had the pleasure of seeing my desk you’ve probably seen, amid the clutter, the Funko Pops, the many pen cups, and the completely unnecessary stack of journals that are in use right now, my very loud and very pink mechanical keyboard (and matching pink mouse). It was a gift from my other half and I love it but what it really needs is a macro pad with all my frequently used words on it (“pimpmobile” for example).
If you’re in the market for a new keyboard, I hope you will take all of the above into consideration. One word of warning before you launch yourself headfirst down this rabbit hole. A lot of membrane keyboards are marketed as “mechanical feel” keyboards and due to the way search algorithms work, they will all sort themselves to the top of the list when you go searching for mechanical keyboards. Don’t be fooled. Read the fine print and make sure you’re getting a a real mechanical keyboard.
Or just save yourself some time by skipping that step entirely and proceed directly to building your own.
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