I'm impressed
I give four star reviews for "good" products. I mean... we all expect "good", so let's save five stars for "exceptional". Well, this keyboard gets -- and deserves -- a five-star rating. You don't realize how important a keyboard is until you get one better than what you have. Like the difference going from a laptop keyboard to a full-sized leaf-spring keyboard. And from that to a board with Cherry switches. And now, the Cherry board. To read the descriptions of most "premium" keyboards (and by that, I just mean keyboards advertised as having Cherry switches, regardless of actual price), you'd think that *the* most important feature is the switches. But going from a keyboard with Cherry switches to an actual Cherry keyboard, the improvements are noticeable. For starters: the home row. Most vendors mark the home keys (F and J on a US keyboard) with a dimple on those keytops. I mean, that's been a standard since I can't recall when... Every vendor seems to have their own take on the size and shape of those dimples. Some are obvious to the touch no matter what; others aren't really felt until your fingertip is in just the right position. But they're always there. So when I first touched the home row of the Cherry board, I was immediately annoyed: no home-key dimples‽ A minute later I found myself thinking, "but I can always find the home keys... how is that possible? (I'm an adequate touch-typist; no expert and certainly no speed demon or accuracy wizard.) And then it hit me: the home keys are a different *shape* on the Cherry board, narrower and with a deeper concavity than the other keys. Just like the venerated original IBM PC keyboards of the `80s. For a lot of folks, a detail like that isn't particularly compelling. If all you've ever used are keyboards created since vendors got serious about cutting prices to the bone, it can be tough to imagine something better. But I swear: if you're a professional who spends way more time on your computer than you do sleeping, this keyboard will make a believer of you. The next thing I noticed is how "precise" this keyboard feels. The keystrokes feel *incredibly* consistent compared to my previous keyboard with Cherry keys. Examining the boards side-by-side, I noticed that the old board had about twice as much lateral play on the keys (in both axes) as do the keys on this Cherry board. I wouldn't have thought so, but the tighter tolerances *do* result in a better feel. Kudos to Cherry! Finally, the elephant in the room: the layout. Yeah, I looked long and hard at this board and its competitors in the rather small field of boards having Cherry keys *and* an integrated touchpad. I really wanted something with a traditional layout, but I didn't want to sacrifice the keypad. Mostly, though, the narrow 16" width was my initial driver. I wanted to have space in my keyboard tray for a headphone amplifier; a full-width keyboard would have crowded the available space. I won't sugar coat this: it took me a while to acclimate to this layout. I still don't have a good kinesthetic sense of the location of the upper navigation keys and the function keys, as I rarely use those. (Most of my work is done using command-line tools; those that are screen-oriented pretty much all have vi-like navigation keys, except for a few that seem hard-wired to behave more like Emacs.) To me, the size and placement of the modifier keys (ctrl, windows, alt and menu) are an improvement over other boards I've used, which uniformly different sizes for at least some of the modifiers. Being the same size as all the other keys (save for those on the edges) makes it quite natural to slide a hand diagonally two rows down to have a modifier key under a specific finger. Really, this is the first time in my decades-long programming career that I've treated modifier keys like that; other keyboards make that kind of move feel far less natural. Again, kudos to Cherry. I very much appreciate when designers put thought into how their product will be used, rather than focusing on visual features. (Greebles for keyboards? Wikipedia "greebles"; it's kinda fun.) The touchpad works fine, although it seems to have no multitouch capability. That doesn't concern me, but it might someone accustomed to zooming and scrolling with a touchpad. The only accommodation I needed to make for Linux is to invoke an xinput command to turn on libinput's accelleration; otherwise it can be pretty tedious to get from one side of the screen to the other. Finally, the Escape key *way* out in left field. As a vi user, the Escape key is important to me. But I know that I can get the same effect with Control-[, which has now become a well-practiced move. I certainly hope this board remains in Cherry's product line. Come time to replace a keyboard, this will be my choice. Read more