Hey {{ subscriber.first_name | strip | default: "friend" }},

When people think about mechanical keyboards, you might stereotypically think of a loud keyboard that is CLACK CLACK CLACKing in the office, annoying people on calls, and interrupting gameplay. But that's not always the case! It all depends on the kinds of switches you have.

Switches come in one of three main categories:

 switches have a bump in the keypress before bottoming out

 switches travel smoothly up and down before bottoming out

 switches are the stereotypical loud and clicky switches

Now, when I say "bottoming out" while typing, that is just a term for pressing a key all the way down to its full depth. Often, mechanical switches actuate (as in, make the connection with the PCB and trigger their keypress) before bottoming out, meaning it's possible to type faster than you would need to with rubber domes (which you'll recall we talked about in the first lesson).

. The lightest you'll usually see is around 35g, and the heaviest you'll see is around 90g. To give you an idea, 35g is so light that you can breathe heavily on it and it'll actuate (okay that's an exaggeration, but it's pretty dang light), and 90g will give your fingers biceps. It's all a matter of personal preference (for what it's worth, I personally prefer heavier switches around 75g).

Anyway, whether they're tactile, linear, or clicky, they will almost always be 

 switches. They have a little plus (+) sign at the top where your keycaps go (the 

 that holds it together. There's a German company called 

 that designed these in the 1980s. These style of switches are so standard that almost all PCBs and keycaps will work with them. Cherry actually does make their own switches, and ones you might recognize: Cherry MX Browns (tactile), Cherry MX Red (linear), and Cherry MX Blues (clicky), and a few other colors.

There are other types of switches, like Alps and Matias switches, but you will rarely, if ever, run into them. The only kind of "alternate" switch that you might see other than these are Topre switches. They are actually an electrocapacitive switch, but much more high quality and long-lasting than a typical rubber dome. If you do ever want to try any of these other switch types, they are available, just less common!

Back to the Cherry-style switches, there's other manufacturers of them besides Cherry themselves, like 

. There's even more than this list, there's so many that you honestly don't need to worry about keeping up with all of them, because the list grows all the time. I'd recommend finding some kind of switch-tester if you want to test them out before committing to any, but overall, 

 with any mechanical switch type because it is guaranteed to last a very long time!

When you put your switches on a board, for the wide keys (like the space bar or the enter key), you'll also have 

 on the board (lovingly referred to as "stabs" on occasion, like the knifey kind). They will also have the little Cherry MX-style stems, but they don't have any weight to them or anything. Their only purpose is to make sure your keycaps are level on the switches.

Now, if you want your switches to be extra custom to you, you can modify them! You can take the housing of one and the stem from another and swap them out, you can put in heavier or lighter springs, and you can add a switch lubricant to make them buttery smooth. This can be tedious (or calming, depends on your personality), but is often worth the effort for a really awesome sound and feel. You can similarly modify your stabilizers. 

Here's a video on how to mod your switches

Personally, I used to really like super heavy tactile and clicky switches. BOX Navy switches and heavy Zealios switches were my jam. And sometimes, they still are!

I definitely prefer switches more than 55g. But, especially in an increasingly remote world, you're on microphones a lot, and those switch noises are 

I've started trying out more quiet switches, like Zilents switches and lubed NovelKeys Creams, and I've been really happy with them.

Experimenting is a part of all the fun! I still use my mega-loud switches while gaming and coding, but I also swap out my boards for quieter ones on calls.

Phew, that was a lot, but we made it through! Next up is keycaps. Let's boogie.

Which of these sounds most like your style?

All about Switches

The mechanical keyboard rabbit hole goes deep. But don't worry, there have been people digging for a long time, so you're not alone! As you customize your board more and get to know your preferences, there's ways to go beyond the usual defaults and layouts out there, and plenty of people to talk to about them, too.

If you've ever been interested in trying out a 

 way like stenographers do, mechanical keyboards are the perfect place to start. You can change around your layout and customize which keys matter most to you by flashing some firmware and typing away!

Hundreds of keyboard PCBs automatically work with 

, which is a software that flashes different layouts onto your keyboard with an easy-to-use interface. You could, say, swap out your Caps Lock key with Escape in just a few simple clicks.

If you want to get even more granular and customizable, you can dive into the 

 which is open source, and supports everything from standard layouts to 

 style keys (which let your keys do different things depending on how often you hit them), 

, and even thermal printer support! Your keyboard can be even more than a keyboard if you want it to be, and QMK is 

 powerful once you get the hang of it. For myself, I don’t do things that are particularly fancy often, but I love enabling media keys like volume controls and muting in every board I build!

Flashing firmware is easier than it sounds, but it’s a topic outside of the scope of this course. Know though that 

you can’t ruin/brick/mess up your keyboard with the firmware you make

. Every keyboard PCB has a reset button, so if you mess it up, you can always refresh it from the beginning! Whether you decide to go custom or stick with the built-in abilities that your keyboard has, it’s fun to learn about these possibilities to decide for yourself if it’s right for you.

Speaking of programming keyboards, you may or may not recognize this little macropad here. I originally designed it as an April Fool's Day joke in 2021 (the joke being that the only thing you need to be a "real developer" is to be able to 

), and it quickly grew to be a popular little programmable macropad that people were programming to their heart's content. These three little keys are QMK compatible, so people have made it work as media keys, macros for running a build or pushing a deploy, and even just a little emoji keyboard!

There's a bunch of fun little macropads out there that you can program to your exact liking, if you're not ready to jump into a full keyboard, yet (or you want to add functionality to what you already have).

 (or lovingly referred to as r/mk) is your friend for learning more about keyboards and seeing what other people have bought and built. There's also a reselling subreddit, 

 (lovingly referred to as r/mm) that will be useful for you as well. If you don't want to use Reddit and go the old-school forum route, 

 is super active with literally millions of posts about all things keyboards.

Also, check in all of these places for a meetup near you! Keyboard meetups are a blast, where you can check out what other people have built in person, try out boards you might normally only see online, and even trade and buy parts. If there isn't a local option, chances are you can find a Discord group or forum for your region.

It has been an absolute blast being in your inbox here and telling you all there is to know about mechanical keyboards. I hope I've answered your questions, and that you're as excited as I am to get your hands on one! Good luck buying, building, creating, and exploring this very fun community. Whether you get just one or build a dozen, this is a hobby that'll last, and I'm honored to be a part of your learning journey.

Going Further

Hey {{ subscriber.first_name | strip | default: "there" }},

Whenever anyone asks me what kind of keyboard they should get, the two things I ask first are the keyboard size, and their budget.

When I talk about keyboard size, I mean the number of keys on the keyboard.

When you think of a typical keyboard, with all of the function keys at the top, the letter and number keys (or 

), modifiers (keys like tab, enter, shift, and control, also called 

), arrow keys on the side, and a numpad, that's considered a 

, as in, it has 100% of the keys you could need.

Sometimes people don't need a numpad for their typical typing, so we could get rid of that and just do the alphas, mods, function keys, and arrows. This is known as a 

 keyboard (because of those 10 number keys), or TKL, or an 

Other times, you might just want to save desk space. You can get rid of the function keys and the arrow keys, and just have alphas and mods. That leads you to a 

, which is where your brain might start to wonder, "wait, stop, why, help, Cassidy I'm scared." Don't worry little lamb! Keep reading!

These percentages are more "standard" sizes, but that is not at all where the customization stops. You can get even smaller keyboards like 40% keyboards, or boards in between the TKL and the 60% at, say, 75%!

Great question. Think about how you type a capital letter on your keyboard right now. You either hold Shift and then whatever letter you want to type, or you tap Caps Lock and START YELLING INTO THE VOID. When you use either of those keys, you're toggling a 

 on your keyboard, making your typically lowercase letters capital, or getting a symbol from your number keys.

Smaller keyboards that don't have certain characters or arrow keys work in the same way, except you control the layers more!

For example, right now I am typing on the 60% keyboard with no arrow keys seen up above. I mapped my Caps Lock key to be a Function key that toggles layers. Now, when I hold that key, I can use HJKL as my arrow keys (kind of like in the text editor vim, if you know it)! I also happened to map < and > to be volume up and volume down while I hold that key, and M toggles muting and unmuting, and a few other fun custom things. How fun is that?? My hands don't have to move around as much, and my keyboard is custom to exactly the layout that I want.

You don't have to necessarily have a standard, staggered, QWERTY keyboard layout. There's tons of options like split keyboards, macropads, ortholinear keyboards (meaning you type on a grid instead of having staggered keys), and ergonomically shaped keyboards!

 is one that you would have to build and solder yourself, but it's both split and ortholinear, and is fully programmable, so you can really get a nice custom feel with it. Meanwhile, 

 is a high quality, pre-built ergonomic keyboard, but it is pricier than you might have budget for.

Electronics are scary, I get it. If you tried to get into mechanical keyboards a few years ago, you would inevitably have to solder your switches in and manually test each connection. There are still a few keyboards out there that require you to solder to build them, but a lot of PCBs are now 

. Hot swappable PCBs are ones where you can just pop switches in and out of the keyboard without any soldering needed, and are increasingly popular!

For myself personally, I admit I was nervous about my own "street cred" when I was going more and more towards hot swappable keyboards, but more on that later!

Size and Shape and PCBs, oh my!

She's beauty and she's grace, she's my keyboard's lovely faaace... that's right, the keycaps. The thing everyone sees first when they see your beautiful mechanical keyboard creation. They don't affect how your keyboard 

Often when you are shopping around for keycaps, you'll see a combination of some letters in front of the keycap name, like SA, DSA, DSS, XDA, KAT, DCX, MT3... these are all describing the 

Each shape is different, and there's no real pros or cons to any of them. They will almost always have the little Cherry MX style plus + underneath, so they will fit on your switches of choice, but the feeling will definitely be different. For example, if you're coming from a non-mechanical keyboard like a Mac keyboard, you might prefer something more low profile, like DSA.

Other profiles like SA and MT3 are very tall. They are based off of older keyboards (a lot of SA keycaps are actually still made with molds from the 1970s), and give your keyboard a very classic feel, but you might need a wrist rest or something to get used to them.

One last thing on the shapes of keycaps: 

 are terms you might see regularly. If something says that your keycaps are sculpted, then that means each row of keys has a different shape and height. If your caps are uniform, that means all of your keycaps are the same shape and height.

You often won't run into issues with these shapes if you're putting your caps on any ol' standard board. But, with sculpted caps in particular, you don't want to put something that's supposed to be on the top row (referred to as row 1 or R1) on the bottom row (R4). It won't match the height properly! So, when you're looking at keycaps for a particular board, if you have a board that has some unusual keycap sizes (like a short Shift on the right side, or extra function keys), make sure you have those rows covered in the keycap set you're about to buy.

Another set of terms that you might regularly see when you're looking at keycaps are 

Both of these are the processes that are used for creating the 

 on your keycaps (as in, the alphas, the mods, etc, which are legend types we talked about previously). There are other types of printing (like pad printing and UV printing) on caps that is less durable and might fade over time, but you mostly see those on cheaper knock-off sites, so I won’t get into those.

Dye-sublimated, or dye-sub, means that the legends are printed onto your keycaps using a really high heat process, and double-shot means that injection molding is used to add the legend (it's an entirely separate piece of plastic).

Both of these are high-quality ways of having your keycaps look great!

There are some differences between them, though.

Double-shot legends tend to look sharper, and because they're separate pieces of plastic, they can be any color you want.

Meanwhile with dye-sub caps, the legend pretty much always has to be darker than the cap color itself.

That being said, because dye-sub keycaps are printed, you have more flexibility on fonts and 

 (which are fun designs and icons on your caps) for your keycaps. It's possible to have fun fonts and novelties with double-shot as well, but that will be more expensive because they have to make new plastic molds for every custom cap.

Both of these types of caps are pretty high durability. Double-shot is the most durable of all (because again, separate piece of plastic), but dye-sub is the second best thing on that front.

If you see double-shot or dye-sublimated in a product description, you can't go wrong!

What's great about keycaps is that you can mix and match different keycap sets and combos to make your keyboard your own. Swapping out your keycaps is as easy as just... pulling them off of your keyboard. It will feel like you're going to break it, but trust me, you aren't!

Using a keycap puller, you can pull off caps as often as you like, and plop in new ones to make the keyboard of your dreams.

Personally, I like all of the shapes of keycaps and choose more based on the color than the shape myself, because life is too short for your keyboard to not be pretty.

I've had both double-shot and dye-sub keycaps on multiple boards, and nothing has ever faded or worn out in the past several years that I've had them. Swap things, experiment, and make it your own!

The Feel of Keycaps

Wow {{ subscriber.first_name | strip | default: "" }},

You know sizes, shapes, switches, and keycaps. You've bought into the hype (maybe). It's time to actually get a mechanical keyboard!

When someone asks me, "Hey Cassidy, what should I buy?" here are the questions I ask:

Do you want to build it yourself, or just configure it and buy it online?

There is a fairly wide range that mechanical keyboards can cost. I have friends who are delightfully happy with their $30 keyboard, and others who thrive on a gorgeous $2000 keyboard. I'd say to set a budget for what you want to spend, and then start researching from there based on the other questions.

We learned before that keyboards can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You need to determine for yourself, do you need a numpad? Do you want arrow keys? Do you need certain function keys? Do you want it to be ergonomically shaped? This question alone will narrow your choices significantly!

On pretty much every board you buy, you will be able to customize the keycaps you put on it. That being said, as you know now, there's so many other ways to customize a board.

Do you want to choose the switches you put on the board? If so, then you'll want to either buy your board in parts, or look for something hot-swappable where you can take the switches out easily, 

 you have to be ready to desolder the existing switches on your board.

Do you want to be able to program your board? With certain boards you can customize what happens when you hit certain keys (for example, on my boards I love hitting Menu+M to mute my computer). This is a topic for another time, but if you think you want to program your keyboard to do something custom, you'll want to look for QMK or VIA compatibility (more on that later), or see in the description if the manufacturer has their own way of customizing the board's layers and keys.

This is very similar to the previous question. How much work do you want to put into making this board fit what you want?

There is absolutely no shame in just buying a board that is already pre-built and fits everything you're looking for. You can buy a fully-functional, powerful, and long-lasting keyboard without having to lift your finger, and it'll look good too. Some of my favorite brands of pre-built boards are from 

. There's some sites too that let you get a pre-built board that you can customize online, like the 

 Ergodox EZ, Moonlander, and Planck EZ boards.

That being said, if you want to build your board from scratch, there's a 

 more options, as you can imagine. I can't actually list all of the options without making this email a tome rivaling 

, but luckily, the nice folks over on the mechanical keyboards subreddit have 

Remember: you don't have to solder, and you don't have to program it, if you don't want to!

We’ll touch on that a bit more in our last lesson in this series!

Which one of these sounds most like your plan?

What should I (meaning "you") buy?

The year is 1985, the IBM Model M keyboard is released. Its layout was standardized, and popular. Its ergonomics were researched more than any keyboard before it. It had buckling spring keyboards, and keycaps that could be changed out, if needed. Nearly every keyboard people use today has the Model M to thank for its origins.

As the mass production of computers and keyboards grew, the quality of keyboards diminished. Parts were made to be more portable and cheaper to make. The electronics changed, too, and rubber domes, or membrane keyboards, became the standard. Rubber domes are a type of switch, where it pushes a spring against a PCB to make a connection to close the circuit (also known as 

These membrane keyboards have buttons that last tens of thousands of cycles (or keypresses), which isn't bad, necessarily. But, when you look at something like the Model M, which lasts millions, you start to wonder why we put up with the cheaper ones.

The hype around mechanical keyboards started with that desire to return to quality. Model M keyboards still work today, exactly as they did decades ago. Mechanical keyboards that you might get (or build!) now will last you an incredibly long time, too.

Mechanical keyboards not only are high quality pieces of equipment, but you can personalize them too. You can choose what size of keyboard you want, your layout, the switches you use, the keycaps you see, and even program the firmware on most models to make every keystroke a custom one. You can even add rotary dials, type in a 

 style, or customize the lighting under every key. It's kind of like making your own custom LEGO set, but a functional, working machine that'll last you a lifetime!

Now, because there's so much to know, it can be overwhelming. In this email course, I'll give you a lay of the land of the essentials you need to know to get started in the mechanical keyboard space, whether you just want to buy one, or build one, or something in between.

If you've ever seen model cars, you might know that there's various kinds of kits for them:

The kind where you can just buy and display

The kind where you can get all the parts pre-painted and pre-built and you just snap them together

The kind where you have to screw all of the parts in

The kind where you have to custom paint every single piece, and glue them perfectly together

Keyboards are similar. You'll never have to play with glue, but you could get one in different ways:

A fully pre-built keyboard (which will let you swap out the keycaps, all boards let you do this)

A "barebones" keyboard (which will let you add your own keycaps and switches)

A DIY kit (which will include a case, switches, keycaps, and electronics)

All separate pieces (where you can decide how you want to mix and match all of the different parts together that you might buy separately)

In a world full of planned deprecation where phones and other electrics only last around 3 years, you can build and customize a mechanical keyboard just for you, that will last as long as you want it to. Programmers, gamers, writers, anyone, can build and enjoy mechanical keyboards.

P.S. At the end of each lesson is a quick question. Selecting an answer will send the next email right away! 

First off, which of these sounds most like you?

Emails

All about Switches

Going Further

Size and Shape and PCBs, oh my!

The Feel of Keycaps

What should I (meaning "you") buy?

Why the Hype?