Comment by oldstrangers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oldstrangers | Hacker News Reader

I've been a fan of mechanical keyboards for 20 years now. I bought a IBM Model M off ebay when I was in my teens. The space itself isn't that fun to participate in, lots of people eagerly waiting to gatekeep their little space. And the really cool stuff is going for $600 before you even add in any switches, boards or keycaps.

All that said, I found Keychron (https://www.keychron.com/) keyboards last year and their quality and price absolutely blew me away. I bought two of the Keychron Q2 QMKs, fully assembled.

Sounds like an ad but I was just so happy to finally find a keyboard of this quality that didn't make me wait 6 months, didn't cost $1200, and wasn't buried in some community exclusive drop that only 18 people would have access to, etc.

I love my K8 except for the paint on the key caps -- its way too thin. I've chipped off the faces of a few keys because (I think[0]) I don't trim my nails every few days, sometimes up to a week. To be fair, I have the same problem with my MBP keyboard, but not with a cheap gimmicky Razer "gaming" keyboard.

I know I can resolve this by trimming my nails every day but boy is that tedious.

0: others have suggested it might be due to skin oils. I dunno. I'm not a chemicologist.

I wanted to love keychron but two issues:

1. No scroll-lock on their keyboards; many KVMs use scroll-lock to control switching

2. The TKL models have the upper-right key lock the screen and it is super easy to hit with my trackball right next to the keyboard. I removed the keycap which helps a lot, but stil...

The Keychron keyboards don't support programmable layouts then?

Mine does, they have a lot of options though so not sure they all do.

I think only the very new ones do; they now sell Keyboards running QMK, which definitely would allow it, but they don't have a TKL option there yet.

Mine just has a switch to toggle between mac and windows layouts.

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