Quick Luddite Notes

⌨️ Another rant on keyboards! ⚠️ UPDATE: Oct. 1

I no longer believe in good keyboards because they no longer exist.

Keyboards for writing, not for gaming.

Keyboards without RGB lighting and without pulsating white lighting, either.

Keyboards that, if they have normal, static lighting, don’t require it to be on for the lettering to be clearly visible. That means that the letters need to be painted, not shine-through areas for the light.

Keyboards that aren’t too mushy or too clicky.

Keyboards that aren’t full-height, because we’re not in 1981 anymore. We’ve been using laptops for more than 25 years. The myth of the fabulous IBM Model M keyboard is just overhyped nostalgia. Yes, I have used it back in the day. No, I didn’t write that many words a day back then.

Today’s keyboards are 100% crap.

If they’re office membrane keyboards, most of them are unusable. The few acceptable ones might only come in US ANSI layouts, and I really need DE-ISO. The famous Microsoft Wired 600 keyboard was surprisingly productive, except for the fucked-up F1-F12 keys. But the retards stopped making it, and the Incase Wired 600 successor only has a US ANSI layout. How can such morons survive in capitalism? Oh, the Logitech K120 is quite usable for a cheap keyboard, but I’m sick of it.

Most low-profile scissor-switch keyboards are also crappy, sometimes even crappier than the actual laptop keyboards. For instance, the Cherry Stream TKL (I prefer TKL or even 75% keyboards as long as they include Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, and decent arrow keys) does have scissor-switch keys, but the actuation force is 65 g. This might not sound excessive, and the 2.8 mm travel seems fine, but writing a lot on it becomes painfully unpleasant. Most likely, the actuation point is very late, so you need to press with 65 g for a long time, only to be abruptly stopped by a metal plate. How could some people say that Cherry Stream is a great keyboard, or at least a “4 out of 5” one? Why couldn’t they make a keyboard much more like a good laptop keyboard? The best keyboard your fingers could dance on was the Logitech K740 Illuminated. Everything Logitech made after it was garbage, and nobody did anything better.

All mechanical keyboards are now made for retarded gamers, not for coders, writers, or decent people.

Normal people don’t need to press 6+ keys in the same millisecond. Normal people don’t need a 2 ms response time. Normal people don’t need flashing rainbow colors.

Most gaming keyboards have only about 12 useful keys, because the rest aren’t used in games. But there is a multi-billion-dollar industry of grotesque “esport” keyboards and mice.

I loved my Keychron K3 with low-profile tactile brown optical switches until I started to hate it with all my guts. The tactile feel is still fine, but surprisingly, my speed and accuracy are lower than on either the Microsoft Wired 600 or the Logitech K740. I’m not sure why this happens, but I have other annoyances with Keychron’s keyboards.

Like most gaming keyboards, the F1-F12 keys are stupidly aligned with the top row of keys. This is not the standard keyboard layout, you fucking morons! I keep hitting F1 instead of ESC because of such idiots. Also, there should be a vertical space between the top row and the F row; there isn’t one.

Some other idiot came up with the idea of a “lightbulb” key in the top-right corner of the keyboard. So, instead of DEL or PgUp (I would have preferred a Home key there), I accidentally hit this orange key, and one of the 16 or 17 (I couldn’t even count them!) light-dancing motifs starts and drives me mad! The fucktards couldn’t switch between 1 or 2 levels of lighting and no lighting. Nope. If I don’t turn off the lighting altogether, I have to live with the risk of needing to hit a key 15 or 16 times until the lighting goes steady—or until I can barely stop myself from smashing the keyboard against a wall!

The lettering on the “A” key is partially gone—the same thing happened to my 2016 Acer laptop. I’m surprised no other key suffered the same damage (I expected the left CTRL to be affected too). But one key began to get stuck (I don’t remember which), so I had to switch it with the useless orange “lightbulb” key.

As it has a German layout (what a miracle that they bothered to manufacture keyboards with a large ISO ENTER key!), some keys have 3 levels. But the placement of some symbols isn’t intuitive: it’s not obvious which ones require SHIFT and which require AltGr. The +*~ key even has the wrong printing: +~*. Yes, the 3 levels are on a horizontal line. How helpful! Not.

Finally, the rechargeable battery is almost dead (no way it had 1550 mAh!), so who cares that it’s a Bluetooth keyboard if it needs to stay connected via USB almost all the time?

The paradox is that Cherry Stream is tiring, but it allows me to write precisely enough:

Meanwhile, Keychron K3’s low-profile brown optical keys feel precise, but they ruin my writing:

The tests have been performed on Monkeytype.

I’m cured of mechanical keyboards. Full-height ones are even worse. Blue switches aren’t just clicky; they’re maddeningly clicky. Red switches feel unnatural. Brown should be the fix, but low-profile, and preferably not on a full-width keyboard, and not US ANSI, and not with dancing lights, and this, and that…

Membrane gaming keyboards? Garbage. I can’t use them. (In most cases, I can’t even see what’s written on the key without the lighting on.)

Mecha-membrane? Even worse.

Why can’t they make a very good laptop keyboard in an external casing? How is this capitalism? Is the world so much of an Idiocracy that an entire industry exists only to manufacture expensive gaming keyboards for generations of retards?

While exploring the non-existent good TKL or 75% (but not smaller) low-profile keyboards, I made a funny discovery on the GearLab website: a few keyboard tests. I never liked the Logitech MX Keys S (or without “S”), and the Logitech G213 Prodigy has many inconveniences for me, but I liked seeing some measured values and comparing them, so here’s a set of rather surprising (for me) characteristics and resulting typing experiences:

Logitech Pebble Keys 2 K380s:

Logitech POP Icon Keys:

Logitech MX Keys S:

Logitech G213 Prodigy (full-size):

I always found Pebble crappy, yet they made a second generation that’s just as bad, and people are buying it! 😮

Logitech POP Icon Keys (not the original POP!) is, at the same time, very laptop-ish, and rather good if I am to trust those testers!

This color looks sexy IMO (German layout):

Some people found it OK, apparently: TechRadar, LaptopMag, and some guys on YT: The Best Magic Keyboard Alternative? and Logitech Pop Icon Keys Review - Just as good as the MX Keys Mini?

A real-life pic (from TechRadar):

But who can I still trust these days? 99.8% of the world's population is stupid.

On the other hand, apparently, the Off White & Orange variant is not available in French or Italian layouts, so I suppose the Graphite & Green is the best choice in such cases:

Oh, boy, they really had to write such inept texts as “ver maj” and “retour arrière” or “bloc maiusc”! Somehow, Italians can understand “backspace” but still need “invio”!

Question: What keyboard layouts have a short left SHIFT key because of a <> key? German, Italian, and French definitely have such a <> key.

Gemini: That shortened left Shift key is the hallmark of the physical ISO standard layout (specifically defined by ISO/IEC 9995-2 for 102-key and 105-key keyboards).

On standard North American (ANSI) keyboards, the Left Shift key is wide (2.25 units). On ISO keyboards, it is shortened (to 1.25 units) to make room for an extra alphanumeric key designated as Key B00 (often called the LSGT key in operating systems, for Less-than/Greater-than).

Because most Continental European languages needed dedicated keys for accented letters or special punctuation—displacing < and > from their US positions on , and .—the B00 key was standardized to produce < (unshifted) and > (shifted).

Layouts that use the short Left Shift for < and >

  1. Germanic & Alpine:
  1. Romance / Southern European:
  1. Nordic & North Atlantic (QWERTY):
  1. Central & Southeastern European:

Notable ISO Exceptions (Short Shift, but not for < >)

A few keyboard layouts use the exact same shortened ISO Left Shift key, but place completely different characters there:

Oh, wait. Logitech POP Icon Keys has another advantage: it uses standard batteries, so you don’t have to worry about rechargeable lithium-ion batteries degrading over time.

Retards be retards, though. How can this keyboard have exactly 324.51 x 136.96 mm? Not 324.5 x 137, mind you. Or, in inches, 12.77 x 5.39. This pharmaceutical precision isn’t typically attained even for drugs!

Exceptionally, the thickness is exactly 22 mm or 0.86 in, although 22 mm = 0.866 in, which rounds to 0.87 in. Logitech’s marketing team is full of morons.

Oct. 1 UPDATE: Monkeytest results for Logitech POP Icon Keys keyboard:

In brief:

Keyboard wpm acc consistency
Cherry Stream 56 98% 66%
Keychron K3 42 90% 47%
Logitech POP Icon 46 94% 61%

The mechanical keyboard still delivers the worst results, despite its low-profile brown keys and pleasant feel!

And the keyboard that literally breaks your fingers, the Cherry Stream, is still number one! Unbelievable.