Wow! I can't believe the famous keyboard youtuber jymv is working right next to me
Let's see what he's using!
Wow!
That's
Really somethin' else
Oh wait, hold on
What's this?
If you’ve followed the channel for a bit, you’ll know that I’m all about custom
keyboards.
For those of you who haven’t, custom keyboards actually just refer to customizable keyboards
that are still unmistakably commercial products.
The difference is generally that custom keyboards emphasize attributes that enthusiasts care
about.
So naturally, I must use one of these all-metal, painstakingly lubed and tuned keyboards topped
with keycaps that cost as much as keyboards themselves right?
Wrong.
My daily driver at work is the Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional Classic.
Note that I said work, meaning at the office, though in case you’re wondering, fear of
theft is not one of the reasons.
In classic high school English fashion, let’s start with my weakest reasons and work up
to the strongest.
And in Jenny Nicholson fashion, let’s put that into a numbered list.
1: I’m really self conscious about the amount of noise I make
Every workplace is different, but I’ve always been worried about driving my coworkers up
the wall with a noisemaker.
Obviously clicky switches are out of the question, but even tactiles and linears come under fire
as well.
The bottom out and return noise these make when compared to rubber domes and laptop keyboards
is actually pretty significant.
As an enthusiast, it’s easy to forget, but it becomes painfully obvious when one day
you’re the first one to show up at the office and it hits you - “oh god, I’m that guy”.
So here, you have two options - type really lightly, or use silent switches.
Typing lightly is possible, but as I get immersed by seeing a 3 hour test fail, smashing that
enter becomes an inevitability, which gets us to --
2: Silent switches are effing doodoo I have a couple yearly rituals.
One is going back to the Korean fried chicken place across the street to see if they’re
actually making good Korean fried chicken yet.
It’s the fifth year and they’re still not.
Like it’s run by Koreans and obviously good recipes exist online, yet they consistently
drop the ball.
One time I got kimchi fried rice there and it was just brown from all the soysauce (which
doesn’t belong here at all) AND they charged me $2 for a fried egg.
Uh, oh I also try a new silent switch every year.
You know, it was the Cherry Silents, then the Gateron Inks, then Zilents, then Bluish
Whites, then Durocks, but they’re all just so poop.
This is subjective, but I just can’t deal with the mushy bottom out on these.
Even though Topre also has a mushy bottom out, it’s different somehow.
It feels more firm and doesn’t make me want to vomit out of my fingertips.
Despite all this, sometimes I commit to typing lightly and bring a keyboard to work and run
into --
3: Custom keyboards are jank There are two sides to this: designer error
and user error.
Designer error being the fact that most of these keyboards are made by hobbyists with
no formal training or testing resources and overlooking small yet immensely important
things that go into a fully baked product.
The biggest example of this I can give is how it took like 10 years for people to finally
start adding shock protection to keyboards, and I don’t mean adding those ESD chips.
I mean providing a path to ground for all exposed metal parts.
The vast majority of the keyboards I own don’t do this at all.
This means that when you shock the board, which is probably even more likely in the
office where the air is dry and you’re always wearing shoes, you’re gonna run into some
stuff.
If you’re lucky, the keyboard will just kind of turn on and off.
The LZ Physix, Jer80, G60 are just the ones I currently own that do this.
Some others will just turn off until you replug your cable.
The old Minivan keyboards were awful for this.
These could happen for shocks that you couldn’t even feel.
Now if you built up some mighty charge, you could do some damage.
I had a 96-key Redscarf board that died completely after a strong shock, and the HBCP had over
half of its LEDs blow out after shocking the plate through the plastic case.
If I shock the Physix particularly badly, it’ll just forget all of my keymaps.
Happened twice so far.
And shocking is only one thing that could go wrong.
The awful Unigo66 for example, which was a completely wireless split ergo, just straight
up had key positions that don’t work, and had an unusable wireless connection, without
a backup wired option.
The Lulu, for another example, doesn’t actually work on Chromebooks when waking from sleep
until you replug the cable.
These are more or less tolerable when you’re sitting at home with time to tinker and other
keyboards to fall back to, but is absolutely unacceptable when you’re at work and some
production issue has sucked all the blood...
ME: hey uh were you the one that pushed prod server template factory impl yesterday?
THEM: yeah seems like it’s stuck on ingestion?
can you take a look?
It’s blocking our 6pm publisher
ME: alright let me take a look
These problems could happen due to user expectations for custom keyboards as well.
In other words, custom keyboards are not idiot proof.
I remember when I brought a Minivan to work at some point.
I’d been happily using it at home for weeks, but I almost immediately ran into a problem.
I hadn’t actually mapped brackets or backticks.
And of course I can’t remap it there because of security policy, so I had to take it back
home and try again later.
This kind of thing must’ve happened a dozen times to me.
I’d never use the insert key at home, but I use it a lot when copying into terminals
on Windows.
I only use Windows at home, but the mods are all wrong when I plug it into a Mac.
That kind of stuff.
Stuff that’s just my fault, but is generally unique to custom keyboards.
So with all this, it should really make sense for why I use the HHKB at work which is
4: The HHKB is OK The HHKB is probably the most mid keyboard
I own, yet it’s the chosen one because it’s got all of the reliability of a normie keyboard,
and has one tiny little upgrade called Topre.
It’s still pretty loud but generally blends into the office keyboard noise profile, while
offering a typing experience that’s not all that remarkable, but still agreeable.
I’m pretty confident it’ll never randomly die on me, or forget its own keymaps, or not
work with different operating systems.
It’s reliable and that’s what matters when I’m trying to turn my life force into
lines of code.
The rubber dome is just a bonus.
I still tried to do some of the enthusiast “stuff” on it, like lubing it a little
bit, and adding upstroke silencing rings, but it’s basically just a HHKB Type-S, and
for the foreseeable future, it’s gonna stay that way.
So yeah, the HHKB is my daily driver not because Topre is cool, but because custom keyboards
are so unreliable.
These problems can be overcome, but that’s for another day, or week, or year.