Keyboards

Started by Steve Elliott, November 05, 2018, 16:03:25

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Steve Elliott

I've been using a small wireless keyboard for a while, but typing on it I never really enjoyed the experience.

Laptop-style keyboards are horrible to type on, because you don't get good feedback like you do with a big clacky keyboard containing raised keys (laptop-style keyboards are terribly spongy).  And those keyboards often have missing keys like a numeric keypad and keys for things like Print Screen (very handy to have for screen grabs).

So I popped to my local PC World/Currys to see what they had.  They had keyboards ranging from £5.99 to well over £100.  As well as offering various features, like coloured lighting on the keys lol, some multi-media features and a built-in track pad.  But for me the most important feature is how a keyboard feels to type on (those expensive keyboards were all spongy to type on) so I bought the cheap £5.99 keyboard!
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NRJ

#1
Quotelike coloured lighting on the keys lol

you mean this type of keyboard


Beautiful, but not good for coders... , Distracting.
IF YOU CAN DREAM IT,  YOU CAN DO IT...

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Steve Elliott

#2
The point I'm making is how I like a good keyboard to type on, and laptop-style keyboards are horribly spongy and contain flat keys.  That keyboard does look like a great keyboard to type on, but I just don't need the light show :)
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Qube

So long story short, Steve bought a keyboard :P

I want the same keyboard feel that was in my Texas Ti-99/4A as that was the best keyboard ever with proper mechanical click sounds and such a nice keyboard to type on.
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Until the next time.

Derron

I prefer "Cherry" keyboards. Low "body height", flat keys (so you do not have to travel too much with your fingers). Cursor keys separate from letter-block, Insert,Pos,PicUp...-Block as two 2*3 instead of 3*3 together with some odd "power/restart"-things other keyboards provide. Keyboard was "silent" - which was important to not annoy my wife when typing some longer texts (especially if you are a fast typing person, the "clack clack" can get annnoyyyying!).
I also never really use the "multimedia keys" ... exception might be a "volume control" (saves some mouse movement).

Most important: you need to be able to press 3 keys at once (just check if WASD + JKL etc are working simultaneously). Some cheap - and also not-that-cheap keyboards lack functionality there. So in keyboard-hefty games you might end up with moving your car, shooting and trying to turn around - and you either turn around or shoot, depends on what you hit first.

A pity that the new Cherry keyboards lack "durability" or feel not that nice when hitting keys as before (only talking abou the low priced variants, I do not like to pay 100Eur for a keyboard - that's almost 25% of my entire computer cost ;-)).

I even bought two used keyboards to get my beloved keyboard variant as it no longer gets produced and the successors are said to be not that good as the "original". Just had to replace mine as I broke some plastic "snappers" when cleaning the keyboard from cat-hair (and whatever else collects there ;-)). Having a space bar which only reacts on 2/3 of its area somewhen annoyed me enough.
When I last checked our university they had the very same keyboards on nearly all "public" computers. So it either seemed to be sponsored things or they thought the same about the keyboard.

Ah - and it did not have that funky rainbow lighting setup NRJ proposed :p


bye
Ron

Steve Elliott

#5
Quote
So long story short, Steve bought a keyboard :P

Twat lol.   :P

Quote
I want the same keyboard feel that was in my Texas Ti-99/4A as that was the best keyboard ever with proper mechanical click sounds and such a nice keyboard to type on.

So long story short, Qube agrees with me - just buy a cheap modern equivalent.  :D

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meems

I'm with Derron on this. I like my keyboard like I don't like my women : flat.

Qube

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Until the next time.

Steve Elliott

#8
Quote
Twat lol.   :P

;D

Clearly you were winding me up haha.   ;D

I don't know meems, I switched off after a mass of text.  American's suffer from this too - get to the bloody point!  Concise is an undervalued skill.
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Xerra

I always think of the Amiga having the best keyboard I've used. Although you kind of get used to anything you type on after a while.

I refuse to use a laptop keyboard at work - I plug in an external via a docking station. Same with a mouse. Keep those trackpads and compressed keyboards well away from me.
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Steve Elliott

Yes the Amiga, Ti 99 and Atari 800 had great keyboards back in the day.  Every PC did.  Then it all went pear shaped lol.
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Derron

Quote from: Steve Elliott on November 05, 2018, 18:56:00
[...] I switched off after a mass of text.  American's suffer from this too - get to the bloody point!  Concise is an undervalued skill.

Oh, so the story of your adventure-competition entry  fits on a 2 lines of text - including "You won!" and "game over".

Elaborative phrases are a skill too. To fill sentences with live, make things sound as if you really spoke with somebody. So excuse us for writing more words than needed to transport the "message". And another side note: if it is not your mother tongue then writing "concise" is way harder as you always circumscribe things in 20 words which a native speaker would be able to describe with 1-2 words.


@ keys
What keys are vanishing on your keyboards as first?
Guess WASD is more often used than cursor keys. for me it was left ctrl - as "space" gladly had no print on it ;-).
See how easy it becomes to derail a thread more and more.


bye
Ron

Steve Elliott

#12
Hehe  ;D, not in adventure terms; but a description has to capture a scene succinctly.  Yeah, I'm sorry.  My German is far worse than your English.

But you're right, it's not a Competition I would be good at either.  I love the genre, and NA is producing great work here.

Keyboards remove numeric keypads and useful keys like Print Screen in favour of multi-media keys - which you can access elsewhere.  Derail is a skill all programmers/coders have ;)
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Derron

But we programmers could put other stuff into a new thread (pun intented) :p

Only "Multimedia keyboards" (for htpc/android-tv-boxes, ...) got rid of the numpad. Each "grown up" keyboard still has them. Nonetheless I never use them except when entering bank account information when doing online banking (as I then blindly can type in long numbers without any mistake for years). For programmers it might even be faster to map some brackets (curly or not) to the numpad :-). Ok, in Blender I use the numpad for view orientation (top, left, ... rotate upwards/downwards..) but effectly I use it rarely. Hah, and if something awaits an English keyboard layout I use the numpad as I know where the slash is there (always have to try out where it hides on the "letter block").


@adventure
Writing long texts in a foreign language is already an adventure (with multiple choice when it comes to interpretation of whatever I wrote compared to what was meant to get written).

bye
Ron

Steve Elliott

Indeed.  But for me a good keyboard feels like the difference between playing chess with a mouse, vs the tactile feel of heavy wooden pieces.
Win11 64Gb 12th Gen Intel i9 12900K 3.2Ghz Nvidia RTX 3070Ti 8Gb
Win11 16Gb 12th Gen Intel i5 12450H 2Ghz Nvidia RTX 2050 8Gb
Win11  Pro 8Gb Celeron Intel UHD Graphics 600
Win10/Linux Mint 16Gb 4th Gen Intel i5 4570 3.2GHz, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 2Gb
macOS 32Gb Apple M2Max
pi5 8Gb
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