A brief reflection and look at how far our community has come since joining. I’ve been in the mechanical keyboard hobby for a very long time. It started as a high school student’s search for a keyboard for writing novels back in the 2008-2009 school year. I thought I wanted to be an author and I felt I needed a keyboard that I could sit down to at my desk and just write. After researching, joining forums, and saving money, I made my first purchase in the hobby, a blank black Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2. I still own this keyboard and while it is heavily modded now, it remains one of my all-time favorites. My HHKB Pro2 with MitchCapped Accents Many people would have stopped there, but keyboards became a hobby. I enjoyed learning about them, and early on, I enjoyed hunting for them in thrift shops. I would dig through bins at Goodwill and Salvation Army while popping keycaps off with paperclips looking for mechanical switches. I searched for a birthday Model M...
May 7, 2024
Hopefully you didn’t catch yourself having spread some of these switch myths around during your time in the mechanical keyboard hobby. If you have, though, take this as a learning opportunity! As I mentioned at the start, there’s been a lot of historical knowledge and wisdom about keyboards passed down by way of oral tradition rather than in documents or videos, and it’s really hard to correct for that kind of ingrained community belief. To be fair, even I am guilty of having believed a few of these when I first started getting into the hobby myself. However, if you’re new to all of this and wanting to start out on the right foot, you should probably go read some more of my guides about switches to make sure you don’t get tricked by any incorrect takes out there. ‘The Secret Beginner’s Guide to Switch Lube’ is a good one to choose if you think you may want to modify switches, and the ‘Switch Marketing Terms: What to Know and What to Ignore’ is great if you’re thinking about picking up any switches soon! (edit: formatting)