I am someone who has not used mechanical keyboards before, but I am curious about them since I read everywhere that they are great. The issue I have is that I obviously don’t know which things I will like or not. For example the switches, there are a lot of brands, and they produce different switches. When I read about them, I see the familiar terms: “clicky”, “tactile”, but I have no idea what that actually means.
However, just starting to buy stuff to test it out will become very expensive, very quickly.
How do you start with this without spending hundreds and hundreds of Euro’s at the start (and without knowing if you like it or not)
For the switches, you can buy switch testers for 10 bucks, with one switch of each brand/type/etc, to give you an idea of how they feel and sound.
Since you are posting in c/emk you might also be interested in ergonomics for keyboards? If you scroll here you will see a lot of different keyboards, many which are split (2 parts, one for each hand). A good idea would be to print the layout of ones you are interested in, to see how they feel with hand placement and movement.
I thought I was posting in the “regular” mechanical keyboard-community. That is my mistake (still new here…).
In terms of ergonomical layout, I will probably stick to a regular one since that is what I have used for decades already.
Do you have any hints on where to buy a switch tester?
Amazon has a bunch of them. If you want to try specific switches, you can create your own 9 keys switcher tester on keygem, they ship really fast (based in Europe).
Oeh, that sound great!
Thank you!
Switch testers are quite nice even if they don’t have the exact switch you want. It’s a lot easier to figure out what the numbers and descriptions mean if you have a comparison point. The switches I ended up with were not in any tester, but the testers were still super helpful.
As for layout, it’s worth being open to the smaller things like CRKBD or Lily58, your brain is better at adapting than you may think. These layouts save desk space, are significantly cheaper, and are quite nice to use. The savings add up especially quick if you are trying out different kinds of keys.
Yeah, those two keyboards are not for me. I don’t even see a row with numbers on top on the CRKBD, and when you work in Finance like me, numbers really are indispesible. And to be honest, I am so used to typing all figures blindly on the numpad, that I really don’t want to mess with that.
For non-financials I can see this working though, so thanks for the advice.
I’d second this. Buy a switch tester, and have a play to see what you like. Some computer shops even have them in store to ‘try before you buy’. Next thing is the keyboard typo. Ortho? Split? 100% or 40%? FWIW I started out with an ErgoDox, and then played with layers and key layouts until I found something I was happy with. Then you can simply stay there, or if you’ve reduced your keys to something like 36-keys, there are a wide range of boards to choose from with slightly varying layouts and designs.