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On mechanical keyboards

The idea of a mechanical keyboard has been intriguing me for a couple of years now but I never really took it further because I wanted to stick to an AZERTY layout. But an couple of months ago, one of my coworkers got into the hobby big time and that got me doing some more researching well, here we are. Guess what I'm typing this on 🙂

AZERTY? ISO!

I mainly wanted to stick to azerty because my personal and work laptops are on that layout. Plus when someone else has to use my keyboard (the girlfriend when we live together and share an office space eg), I don't want it to a hassle. Plus I'm quite happy with AZERTY and I can touch type on it at decent speed.

In researching different types of keyboards I discovered that there are the main 2 layouts are ANSI and ISO. And AZERTY fits in an ISO layout. So that's that.

But it's so loud

In the fall of 2020, I borrowed said coworkers Keychron K2 (after he stepped up to a custom board). It came with Gateron Red switches and those were really quite loud. So much so that people noticed my typing during video meetings and I had to mute myself while taking notes. And since, with the whole pandemic going on, video meetings are where I spend have my work days, that was an issue.

So I went searching for a more quiet switch and found the Gateron Aliaz Silent MX Mechanical Switch. From both written and YouTube reviews, these looked like a good starting point for someone building a first keyboard like myself.

For a case, I went with for an Idobao ID80v2 75% keyboard.

The first set of keycaps I ordered was a very cheap blank white DSA set from AliExpress and was great to get me started. But then a couple of weeks later Oblotzky had PBT Notion in stock and I had to get it 🙂. Here's the finished board so far:

Tiny details:

I'm very happy with the result so far 🙂