The Cult of Click

For quite a while now I've been using a pretty cheap low-profile Monoprice keyboard on my main linux box. The typing experience on it is pretty lacklustre, as you might expect for its low price point, but that hasn't been much of an issue given that I mostly access the machine over the network, and I rarely need to type on the machine directly. However, recently I've noticed that typing on that keyboard is bad enough that I'll often end up completely mistyping commands, passwords, etc due to the mushy, sticky keys, and that's just not something I want to deal with on the (thankfully rare) occasions that I need to bash on the machine directly.

Thankfully the keyboard market has come a long way since I bought that monoprice keyboard, and these days you can get a surprisingly solid mechanical keyboard for under $30. So I got a surprisingly solid mechanical keyboard for under $30.

This is the MageGee MK-Star, which is definitely a brand and product name that can only come out of the weirder corners of China. But China is who we can thank for the frankly brutal value optimization that's been going on in the keyboard space over the past few years so I'm not even slightly mad.

It's an 80% / 87 key layout, which is basically the same as a full size 104-key layout, just sliced off at the dividing line between the home/end/page-up/page-down block and the numpad. There are a number of smaller layouts than this, but I specifically wanted to keep the ins/del/printscreen/scrolllock/pause buttons as they're sometimes used in linux, despite all but the del and printscreen keys being unused on most other platforms.

Now part of the mechanical keyboard experience is customization, and this MageGee keyboard, despite its bargain price, comes with some customization options right out of the box. I mean first off it's got a lovely blue and white colour scheme, but it also comes with a selection of 16 purple keys that you can swap in to various places.

I'm definitely a fan of a purple-blue-white combo, so I did some swapping.

I initially included the wasd swap, but later switched it back out for the blue as I wasn't really feeling like the gamer cred was making a lot of sense in the context of where I was using this keyboard.

Now, this swapping process actually exposes the first bit of budget silliness that this keyboard has, in that three of the included keys are uhh...

... they do know that this keyboard doesn't have a ten key numpad, right? Well, anyways, I guess having 13 customizable keys is fine too.

The keyboard naturally has backlighting, though at this price point you only get a pale blue colour rather than a full RGB experience. You do get a bunch of different patterns that the lights can blink in, though, just in case you want to spend all your typing time being distracted by your keyboard instead of looking at your screen. I just opted for the "solid on" pattern, because I guess I'm boring that way.

Anyway, this keyboard is quite a nice replacement for the old monoprice slab, though I have to say that looking at the two side by side like this kind of shows how efficient the 96% layout of the monprice is, squeezing a 10-key pad and all of the home/end etc buttons into a footprint that's barely wider than the 80% layout that doesn't include the 10-key pad.

So, do I like this keyboard? Surprisingly, despite its bargain price, I kind of do. It definitely lacks a premium feel; the keycaps have a dry, hollow feel that seems to match the dry, hollow sound of the keyswitch clicks. It's also been quite an adjustment typing on a full travel keyboard after spending the past decade or more only typing on low-profile keyboards, but I'm slowly managing to re-learn how to press keys that actually move.

I think if I get another mechanical keyboard, which I am tempted to do, I'll go just a little bit more upscale now that I have a feel for what I'm in for, and I might experiment with getting a low-profile mechanical as those do actually exist.

In the meantime, though, I will enjoy using this keyboard.