Ever gotten annoyed with the sound of your keyboard? Irritated that a key has a crumb lodged under it, preventing it from sounding like its neighbors, even though it still works fine otherwise? Maybe you wish your keyboard had more physical feedback, so you felt like you were typing on a typewriter, where your keypresses are mechanically interacting with the document you’re typing.
You may be delighted to discover you’re not alone – there’s a huge community of people online seeking out the same sensory input as you! Even better, there are entire genres of clacking noises, ranging from sharp, dry, brittle sounds to softer, smoother ones. Prices vary wildly too, on all fronts: you can buy a well-recommended keyboard in any sound style for a reasonable cost, or you can really shell out and purchase each element – from the keyboard base to the switches registering your presses to singular keys themselves – individually. This gives you an enormous range of options, from resistance to sound to response time (if you’re looking at these things for gaming reasons) and make it possible to build a truly unique, one-of-a-kind keyboard from the base up.
You can find light-up bases that react to individual keystrokes, or solid, businesslike ones in single colors. You can even find toggle-able ones. Transparent keys? Ceramic? The world is an oyster, and you can find any number of cute character CTRL keys to slap on that bad boy when you’re building it. To some extent, with a little practice and patience, you can even custom-pour your own keys, given the popularity of epoxy today. Where the rest of a computer can’t be changed (at least for cheap) the keyboard itself can be twisted beyond all recognition of form or function.
You can even get keyboards with varying numbers of keys on them – from keyboards meant for writing in Mandarin to keyboards meant for writing in binary, you can find almost any number of keys. If you need the keyboard split so you don’t hunch your shoulders together? That exists too. Curved boards. Circular boards. Boards with joysticks that work like stenographer keyboards.
The keyboard is easy to forget, yet it’s such an essential part of your computer that when you get a bad one, or one that forces you to hold your arms incorrectly above the desk, you notice immediately. Type covers only exist because the experience of typing on a touchscreen directly is so un-ergonomic it turns painful in no time at all. Laser keyboards failed because the lack of feedback was such a drag! The keyboard experience is irreplaceable. Your keyboard is one of two or three tools you have to talk to your computer – if you don’t like your bog-standard Logitech Bluetooth, consider investing in a mechanical one.