From the Desk of the Liquid Engineer

Title is the output of feeding Apple’s Translation Widget “The Cramping Fingers.” When translating the phrase back to English with the same widget, I get “the in-squeezing fingers.” Things like this keep me from worrying that machines will rise up to kill us in the near future.

I spend a disproportionate amount of my day in front of a computer, so I’m a bit of a keyboard geek. If I’ve got to use something for hours at a time, I want it to be top quality. For me and many others, the epitome of keyboards were the IBM Model M and Apple Extended Keyboard/Apple Extended Keyboard II, the latter of which was the keyboard I had on my first computer.

Quoting Steve from the Apple Extended Keyboard II page linked above, these keyboards are relics from a time

when building a keyboard actually meant building something that you could, in an emergency, reliably use as a blunt weapon.

Most modern keyboards would shatter if you attempted to use them to defend your person, and that’s just not acceptable. But I would wager that for most, it is not these relics’ value as melee weapons that makes them desirable. Rather, it is the mechanical, spring-based key-switches. These, as their name implies, spring back up immediately after they are pressed, which gives a much more solid feel–the user knows when a key has been hit, because it’s already trying to come back up.

Theoretically, and anecdotally in my usage, this results in a more pleasant typing experience, as the user expends much less energy pressing the keys, resulting in less hand strain and perhaps faster typing. By contrast, most modern keyboards use very cheap rubber/silicone membrane switches that are, for lack of a better word, mushy. There’s no real response in many of these cheap boards when you hit the keys, making it difficult to train your muscles when to know to stop, which means much wasted, superfluous effort and mashing.

There are a number of options for getting high quality mechanical keyboards today. I prefer the Das Keyboard. Out of all the boards I’ve seen currently in production with mechanical switches, it’s one of, if not the, sturdiest, and as such serves very well the keyboard-as-blunt-instrument-of-destruction ideal. It’s built with high quality mechanical switches, and doesn’t try to hide the fact that these switches are loud. When I really get going, it sounds like a tiny airplane is taking off, which I like to imagine impresses onlookers and passerby. Plus, there isn’t a single keycap anywhere on the entire keyboard. I’m enough of a nerd that I count that as a feature. And here’s a neat thing that those classic keyboards didn’t have: the keys are weighted. It takes less pressure to hit the keys meant for your pinky than for your pointer finger, etc. There’s even a nice chart on the we site illustrating the pressure zones. Cool! (Bonus: Casual usage of your computer by those just passing through is discouraged, as newcomers are thoroughly intimidated, even if they already know how to touch type. It’s kind of funny to watch.)

The keyboard does have two caveats potential buyers should be aware of. First, it’s rather expensive: 69-80 dollars retail, depending on where you shop. I don’t consider this a negative, per se: it’s a high quality piece of equipment and should last for years. You get what you pay for.

Caveat deux is a genuine negative, one I hadn’t discovered until tonight. The Das Keyboard is designed for Windows devices but since it’s just a USB keyboard there’s nothing to stop you from using it with a Mac. However, two of the key mappings are hardwired to be in the wrong place for a Mac user. Specifically, the Option (Alt) and Command (Windows)* keys are swapped. Since the latter is the key** to 95 percent of all keyboard shortcuts on the Mac, this is a bit of a problem, though it’s certainly not insurmountable. Quite the contrary, the solution is simple: using the Control Panel, it is very easy to tell the system to read a Command signal as Option, and vice versa. I did this several months ago when I got the keyboard and never thought about it again.

But as I mentioned in my last post, we’re moving, I’m writing this from a hotel room, and my svelte Das Keyboard is in the back of a Jeep Rubicon somewhere, which means I’m using my laptop’s built in keyboard again. I didn’t think much of this until I tried to Select All and instead pasted a symbol. Switching the key signals produced the proper behavior on the Das Keyboard, but left the internal keyboard with the key signals incorrectly swapped. Annoying. It took me ten minutes to realize the keyboard circuits hadn’t literally been crossed, and another ten to find the setting to switch the keys back, and thanks to my muscle memory and the odd contortions necessary to do keyboard shortcuts when the Command key is in the wrong place, I was left with a not insignificant bit of finger cramping. Double plus ungood.

This was easy enough to fix, but as far as I can tell, I have to go in and reset it manually every time I need to plug in/unplug my external keyboard. This is, obviously, somewhat lame, and could be fixed with a very simple keyboard driver from the makers of Das Keyboard, but they, like many other hardware vendors, do not believe full Mac support is worth their time, so I find myself faced with an experience that is overly clunky. Perhaps I can learn enough AppleScript to automate the setting changes? I shall have to ruminate on this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Peace out.

*Yes, I know Command and the Windows key are not direct analogues, but for the sake of this discussion, they’re close enough.
**Pun!

[tags]keyboard, keyboards, apple, apple extended keyboard, apple extended keyboard 2, apple extended keyboard II, ibm, ibm model m, model m, das keyboard, mac, macintosh, macs, macintoshes, os x, mac os x[/tags]

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