I see many fellow programmers buy and use the cheapest peripherals they find, and it bothers me. They are tools of our trade, and we will spend thousands of hours glued to our peripherals.
Getting a decent keyboard/mouse/headphones/monitor will make life a little more pleasant for a very small upfront investment.
I feel like an expensive mouse is trivial and unnecessary. Unless you are looking for a highly responsive gaming mouse but that is unrelated to bashing out some code.
I bought the cheapest 24 inch monitor and I saved $80. Three years later and I have no complaints what so ever.
I know a lot of people like this. I am a major keyboard geek; I started with a Model M, and moved to a HHKB professional. Then I bought a Realforce (same keyswitches as the HHKB, but different weighting depending on the strength of the finger that presses the key. great design.)
I showed my coworkers these, and they agreed that the keyboards were significantly nicer than any they had used. And at around $250 for either, they were pricey, but that could be gotten over.
The end result was that one coworker bought a Cherry Brown-based keyboard that was $120 cheaper. "I don't really like it very much. It's not as good as yours." Well, yeah. Another coworker decided, "I am definitely going to get a HHKB", and ended up with a $30 Sun type-7. Acceptable layout, $1 keyboard level "keyswitches". "I don't like it very much." Well, yeah, it's a $1 keyboard that you paid $30 for.
Topre keyboards cost $250 because they are worth $250. When you make that in a few hours of typing on one, it's silly to try and save a few bucks. My only regret is that I can't get the Realforce keys in a HHKB form factor :)
I also wish that people would learn where the keys are without looking, and how to press them with the correct finger. I did that, and it has improved my comfort greatly. (Actually, it made my left pinky hurt, since it is responsible for a metric fuckton of keys. Hence the Realforce.)
+1 for a very detailed summary of various mechanical switches and boards. A pity they glossed over the Alps switches, but few people know anything about them in detail. You owe it to yourself to get a good keyboard! Not all mechanical switches are noisy, so it's possible to use one without annoying your cube mates.
I switched from a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard to a relatively basic Mechanical Keyboard with Blue Cherry keycaps. My typing experience has never been better, and I really recommend investing in a good mechanical keyboard for everyone.
If you're in India and need a good keyboard - I recommend the TVS Gold, an unlikely name which actually is somewhat comparable to a Das Keyboard.
I live in India and am a proud owner of a TVS Gold.
I got it for the equivalent of around $30 USD.
A mechanical switch keyboard is completely worth it, if you're like me, and want to feel pampered when typing. It also boosted my untrained typist- WPM by 10 instantly. Its that smooth.
I believe it uses 'Cherry Blue' switches, and the key surfaces have an concave curve that invites your fingers to caress them. For hacker folk, stuck using membranes for whatever reason: you don't know what you are missing; Seriously.
Get a good mechanical keyboard today! Don't pinch pennies and stress your bread-and-butter body-parts.
Lots of folk smuggle these back to the States. Ask your mates with family in India to help you out.
I have a collection of Model Ms and I love them. However, as my main home and work computers are Macs, and the Ms are missing one of the control keys, I'm out of luck.
I have a das keyboard at work, which is pretty good, but not as nice as the M. I always thought that it had the same mechanism as the M but this article says not.
Does anyone know of a natural mechanical keyboard, something similar to the MS Natural 4000 perhaps? I have and like the 4000, but nothing replaces the mechanical "bounciness," if I may invent a word.
I use the Kinesis Advantage: http://jseliger.com/2009/07/20/kinesis-advantage/ , which is probably as close as you're going to get to what you're looking for. The keys are Cherry Browns, per the picture in my review.
Sadly, the best keyboards ever made by mankind were the MIT AI Lab (about the same as the Stanford AI Lab) keyboards, custom manufactured by the now-defunct Microswitch corporation. The second-generation versions (LLL and Sun/Symbolics keyboards) were not up to snuff, but were still pretty spectacular.
It's hard to describe the feel of the original AI Lab (Tom Knight) keyboards--even though they had a fairly long throw, the action was so smooth and natural as to defy imagination.
I even bought into a custom run of the LLL keyboards (second or third generation), at $600 each, and jerry-rigged a little home-made 68K processor board to translate the up/down signals into standard ASCII serial keycodes using a UART.
Hmm... I just ordered a Happy Hacking Lite 2 keyboard, which uses a membrane switch. The HH Professional uses a mechanical switch, but the ~$250 price scared me away. I also looked at the Das Keyboard and the Unicomp Customizer, which are both mechanical.
Has anyone used both versions of the Happy Hacking keyboard? Is there really a huge difference in the feel of the membrane version and the mechanical version?
Related topic.... never tie a key directly to an interrupt line of a processor...except maybe the reset line but even those lines can have weird timing issues on some parts.
Lots of people make this mistake on embedded processor designs and waste monumental amounts of time trying to fix bounce problems with timers and other interrupts.
Brand-new keys react differently than old worn out keys, and different types of keys react differently, thus many interrrupt driven designs fail!
The best way to process keys is to sample them on your tick / jiffy interrupt. All the older Commodore computers (PET / VIC20 / C64) used this concept, and it worked great.
The old Commodore computers read the keys at 60 Hz, which is kind of slow for a full keyboard, but it still worked great. If you have some keys that aren't pressed very often, then likely you could sample them at a slower rate.
Another place that many designs critically fail is that people don't take static electricty into account. For single push buttons on PCB's, I always buy buttons with a metal case that is connected to a ground pin, thus increase the change that static electricity will go through the case instead of sensitive electronics, also I prefer to use some type of IC buffer chip that can handle static surges to stop them from getting to my microcontroller.
I purchased 3 of those small Dell keyboards that come with Dell desktop computers. They don't take up much desktop space. I even connect one to my laptop at home so that way I'll dump my drink in the exteranl keyboard instead of my expensive laptop, also it prevents wearing out letters on the keys on my laptop. It is much cheaper to throw out a cheap $20 external keyboard that to fix a laptop!!!
A friend of mine struck gold and found a pile of Model M's in hard rubbish. Its pretty easy to tell who now has them when using skype/vent/etc.
Personally, I use an ultra flat logitech illuminated keyboard, mostly for the shape and feel and not the illuminated keys which is a bit redundant unless one is hunting and pecking. Really don't like the way the wrist has to arch up for the more conventional keyboards, and i'd rather not have a wrist rest when I can just have a keyboard with a similar profile to my desk.
22 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 60.2 ms ] threadI see many fellow programmers buy and use the cheapest peripherals they find, and it bothers me. They are tools of our trade, and we will spend thousands of hours glued to our peripherals.
Getting a decent keyboard/mouse/headphones/monitor will make life a little more pleasant for a very small upfront investment.
I bought the cheapest 24 inch monitor and I saved $80. Three years later and I have no complaints what so ever.
I showed my coworkers these, and they agreed that the keyboards were significantly nicer than any they had used. And at around $250 for either, they were pricey, but that could be gotten over.
The end result was that one coworker bought a Cherry Brown-based keyboard that was $120 cheaper. "I don't really like it very much. It's not as good as yours." Well, yeah. Another coworker decided, "I am definitely going to get a HHKB", and ended up with a $30 Sun type-7. Acceptable layout, $1 keyboard level "keyswitches". "I don't like it very much." Well, yeah, it's a $1 keyboard that you paid $30 for.
Topre keyboards cost $250 because they are worth $250. When you make that in a few hours of typing on one, it's silly to try and save a few bucks. My only regret is that I can't get the Realforce keys in a HHKB form factor :)
I also wish that people would learn where the keys are without looking, and how to press them with the correct finger. I did that, and it has improved my comfort greatly. (Actually, it made my left pinky hurt, since it is responsible for a metric fuckton of keys. Hence the Realforce.)
If you're in India and need a good keyboard - I recommend the TVS Gold, an unlikely name which actually is somewhat comparable to a Das Keyboard.
I got it for the equivalent of around $30 USD.
A mechanical switch keyboard is completely worth it, if you're like me, and want to feel pampered when typing. It also boosted my untrained typist- WPM by 10 instantly. Its that smooth.
I believe it uses 'Cherry Blue' switches, and the key surfaces have an concave curve that invites your fingers to caress them. For hacker folk, stuck using membranes for whatever reason: you don't know what you are missing; Seriously.
Get a good mechanical keyboard today! Don't pinch pennies and stress your bread-and-butter body-parts. Lots of folk smuggle these back to the States. Ask your mates with family in India to help you out.
Some TVS Gold Pr0n: http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:7268&do=co... (warning: around 2MB of image content)
I have a das keyboard at work, which is pretty good, but not as nice as the M. I always thought that it had the same mechanism as the M but this article says not.
Time to try a Unicomp.
Model M = crunchy like cheerios das = crunchy like rice krispies
I remapped the Keys:
It's hard to describe the feel of the original AI Lab (Tom Knight) keyboards--even though they had a fairly long throw, the action was so smooth and natural as to defy imagination.
I even bought into a custom run of the LLL keyboards (second or third generation), at $600 each, and jerry-rigged a little home-made 68K processor board to translate the up/down signals into standard ASCII serial keycodes using a UART.
Oh well...
Has anyone used both versions of the Happy Hacking keyboard? Is there really a huge difference in the feel of the membrane version and the mechanical version?
Lots of people make this mistake on embedded processor designs and waste monumental amounts of time trying to fix bounce problems with timers and other interrupts.
Brand-new keys react differently than old worn out keys, and different types of keys react differently, thus many interrrupt driven designs fail!
The best way to process keys is to sample them on your tick / jiffy interrupt. All the older Commodore computers (PET / VIC20 / C64) used this concept, and it worked great.
The old Commodore computers read the keys at 60 Hz, which is kind of slow for a full keyboard, but it still worked great. If you have some keys that aren't pressed very often, then likely you could sample them at a slower rate.
Another place that many designs critically fail is that people don't take static electricty into account. For single push buttons on PCB's, I always buy buttons with a metal case that is connected to a ground pin, thus increase the change that static electricity will go through the case instead of sensitive electronics, also I prefer to use some type of IC buffer chip that can handle static surges to stop them from getting to my microcontroller.
All food for thought...
Personally, I use an ultra flat logitech illuminated keyboard, mostly for the shape and feel and not the illuminated keys which is a bit redundant unless one is hunting and pecking. Really don't like the way the wrist has to arch up for the more conventional keyboards, and i'd rather not have a wrist rest when I can just have a keyboard with a similar profile to my desk.
http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Topre+Realforce+Refer...