I Became a Keyboard Guy

A few months ago I was talking to one of my best friends. He was talking about how he’d gone and bought a bunch of equipment for a new hobby he was getting into, and I made the mistake of saying he tends to go overboard when getting into something for the first time.

Now he’s never going to let me live down my newfound addiction: mechanical keyboards.

It started from a place of necessity, in all fairness. Before now, I’d only ever owned two keyboards: the one that I got with my first gaming computer in 2014, and the one I replaced it with in 2020. I’d never had the patience for switches and circuit boards in the past, and in truth I’d not cared about all of the nuances between different models. I only had one preference, and that was for blue, clicky switches. About a month ago, though, that all changed when my keyboard gave out.

It might have been my fault, as I’d taken to cleaning it like I usually do, and hadn’t had any problems out of it until a day or two after I put the keycaps back on. I usually use electronics cleaner and a cotton swab to clean over the board, so I probably used too much cleaner and shorted the board somewhere. Either way, I was in desperate need of a new keyboard. Like before, I thought I’d just grab the first decent one I could find that had clicky switches. Then I thought about it for a minute, and that minute would turn into a month of waiting.

My first step was to look into some smaller options. I’ve never really had an issue with my full-size keyboard, per se; it’s not like I’m hurting for desk space, but I also never really made great use of the number pad, either. My first thought was to look at something just a little bit smaller.

A little turned into a lot. I ended up settling around the 60% mark, where keyboards seem to meet the perfect intersection of capacity and function. Pretty much anything I wanted to do could be achieved on that board without even using a layer or a macro. I ended up with just a couple, for the fringe cases where I would actually need numpad inputs, like when using Blender, and the arrow keys were mapped to a layer overtop WASD.

The actual board that I settled on was the AULA Mini60 HE Pro: A budget offering, compared to the borderline-Giffen ‘premium’ keyboards trending into the three hundred dollar territory. I put on a keycap set called “Camping” which features creamy off-white coloring mixed with muted red and green, and just feels cozy.

I seriously love these keycaps.

The switches on the Mini60 HE Pro were probably the most impressive part to me. There’s always something to be replaced when you’re working on one of these things, but I think I might just keep this particular set in-tact. They have a hard, marbly feel that makes the keycaps feel like stone under my fingers, and it’s just insanely fun to type on. Every key—even the spacebar—feels amazing.

I figured I wouldn’t need anything more than that. I was wrong.

To be fair up-front, I was insanely impressed by the AULA. It’s my favorite of all the keyboards that I ended up buying, and my daily driver. If it wasn’t for my affliction, I could have stopped there. You see, in addition to my love of buying things on AliExpress, (which is where I picked up the AULA, among others) I also have a serious problem about low-balling people on eBay. It’s one of my more toxic traits. So before my AULA keyboard had even arrived to port from China, I had accidentally spent an extra 35 dollars that I didn’t have to, on a keyboard that was almost identical to the one I was about to receive.

This one is a little more on the cheap side compared to the AULA, with pretty standard switches and an underlying board that doesn’t really impress me all that much. It does have a full set of arrow keys, though, and even a delete key squeezed in where the oft-unused right shift key would go, so I do still find myself using it on occasion.

This one was fitted with keycaps from Keychron.

But it was neither of the two 60% boards (I think technically the Skyloong is a 65%?) that really captured me, so much as it was the challenge of something just a little bit smaller.

Earlier in the year, a group called PromoType announced a group buy for a board called the KeyBoy Advance. Group buys are a bit of a new—and incredibly infuriating—concept to me, so when I saw the announcement a couple months before my keyboard broke and sent me on this journey, I wasn’t moved. I wish that I had been, though, when I think back on it. The KeyBoy Advance is a very unique 50% build using some Japanese design language, like in its enter key arrangement, and featuring a split spacebar design commonly seen on the boards with lesser key counts. It also borrows a lot from the HHKB (Happy-Hacking Keyboard) design, which pushes modifier keys toward the center of the board, and away from the wrists. I really liked the combination of design elements, but just couldn’t really stomach the asking price. So I skipped.

Come time to start buying keyboards, I found myself enamored with the concept of a small keyboard again. 50% is kind of a rare ask for consumer boards, though, so I decided to go even smaller for my backpack-approved pick. In the same order as my AULA keyboard, I also picked up the TH40 from Epomaker.

Just look at this little guy!

This keyboard is just what I wanted for portability. Since I got it in and configured (which was, for your information, a huge pain in my ass) I have used it probably more than any other keyboard I have for writing, both to overcome the learning curve from a 40% and to experiment with just how small I can go before losing my edge in typing. It’s actually been performing very well: I even typed this entire article using it! There’s a lot of layer working at play here, and I’m still not 100% used to the process just yet. But I can get by, and the ability to take a mechanical keyboard with me out of the house has actually boosted my productivity. It also turns some annoyed heads at cafes, so I apologize if you’re one of the select unlucky few that ends up sitting nearby when I’m typing.

I think for the immediate future I enjoy what I have. At least, that’s what I tried to convince the friend I mentioned earlier, before sending him a picture of another keyboard about 45 minutes later, thus proving that I was even worse than him. Until I get the guts to start soldering my own board designs, though, I think this is good enough for me.

Keycaps are a different story though. You can never have too many of those. In fact, I’m not really liking the centered text on the TH40’s stock keycaps. Anyone have any ideas?

If you’d like me to review a product, email me: me@jaw.fyi