The Computer Thread

I believe that's it. The lettering on the keys are clear to let backlighting through, so it appears to be this.

So yeah, if your concern is wearing through the ink too fast, you'd want to be looking for double shot keycaps of some sort.

I assume the nature in how double shot keycaps are made means that I won't be finding any of such keycaps that work with backlighting?

Hmm? I'm sure they probably exist. It's basically a two-step process which creates the keycap with two different plastics. One forms the majority of the keycap, the other does the letter (in the most basic form, there's other weirder combinations). I think I saw something like it with a translucent legend on a cursory glance but tbh I'm quite happy with boring old black-on-beige for my keyboard.

Might take some searching and so on, but you can absolutely find 'em.

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 28th 2024 at 11:50:15 AM

I constantly wear the coatings off of my keyboards. I went through two Razer Cynosas and was getting very frustrated with them, but then they came out with a new Ornata line. This one features something called "UV-coated ABS keycaps", and while that may be marketing mumbo-jumbo, whatever it is worked great, since my latest keyboard shows no signs of that kind of wear.

Just for the record, it's not the friction that wears though the printing on your keycaps.

Its your skin oils.

Wipe them down occasionally and they will last much longer.

It's something about the way they make modern keyboards, I think. The older ones never seemed to have this problem.

Before I went with Razer, I used to buy Microsoft Internet Keyboards and they would lose their key surfaces too. It's my skin oils.

I think my last attempted purchase was also a Razer Cynosa. And its paint on those keys was just starting to wear off.

I know old IBM keyboards used dye sublimation, so you'd have to pretty much wear through the entire keycap for the legend to fade, but I don't know if it was that common anywhere else. And old keyboards have always had... odd implementations and cost a lot more. It's just bizarre that even most moderately expensive modern keyboards basically just... silk screen on.

True but those old IBM Model Fs and Model Ms like never die. You can smack someone over the head with one and they will still be working fine.

Edited by terumokou on Apr 28th 2024 at 7:03:30 AM

Yeah, meanwhile, I killed two Microsoft keyboards just by giving them a thorough cleaning (they broke around the third or fourth time I did so).

Sure, but they're not the only old keyboards.

I have a replica F. I would take it apart as one of the springs (the + key) doesn't really buckle correctly unless held down... but I ordered another one when the project started offering the full Model M layout and I really miss having that many keys.

Ars does regular articles on keyboards, if you guys are interested, they did a huge overview article just some weeks ago.

I use an Asus mechanical keyboard whose switches can be hot swapped. It was fun to tinker with! And on a similar subject, I feel like so many gaming keyboards are all ten-keyless, making it more difficult for me to find keyboards that are full sized.

Indeed. I can't stand it when keyboard skimp out on stuff like the number pad. I fully intend to buy a full-size keyboard (or keyboard template) for my carefully-planned purchase.

I must live in a weird alternate world because whenever I look for keyboards online, I always find them in versions both with and without the ten-key pad.

I think the proper term is "104 key keyboard", for the full-sized ones. Then you cut down the percentage number for the smaller ones (which I'm staying clear of).

Razer refers to the ones without the keypad as "tenkeyless" on its website. I can't speak to others.

A lot of times when I'm bored and browse on Chrome on my phone, it'll show sites I might like and sometimes it'll show a site going "Best keyboards of [current year]". 9 times out of 10, they'll show keyboards without the num pad.

Yeah, TKL is without the numpad specifically.

TKL or outright 60% keyboards (so no function keys or even cursor keys) are popular amongst keyboard enthusiasts. I can't remember what % it is to have cursor keys somewhere but... nope, I can't understand how people deal with that.

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 29th 2024 at 2:45:26 PM

That's just click farming bullshit. Ignore it.

I personally prefer anywhere between 65% and tkl as I really don't need the numpad and extra keys, save for a couple days to toggle Rivatuner to monitor temps.

Gotta love the extra mouse space.

No idea why it would be popular, the num pad is super useful. I would much rather type a number on that with one hand than use the top row ,and it's a lot more accurate too. Even as a seasoned typist, I can still mess up with that top row from time to time.

I suppose the main reason would be desk space, as has been noted already, but we need to consider that people use keyboards for a lot of different things and it's pointless to criticize such choices.