I don't get mechanical keyboards

19 Oct, 2025

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a mechanical keyboard, the Keychron K3 Max (with brown switches). This is the first mechanical keyboard I've owned, the most experience I've had with them before this was typing on demo units in stores and briefly on friends' keyboards. I've been using the K3 Max on my personal machine for the last couple weeks and while I'm certainly getting used to it, I still don't quite get the appeal of mechanical keyboards.

Backing up, my preference with keyboards has been scissor switch mechanisms, similar to what is found on most laptops. For work I use the Pebble Keys 2 K380s (a phenomenal typing keyboard, especially for the price), and on my personal machine I used the MX Keys S. This preference for shorter travel is why I chose to go with a low profile mechanical keyboard (that and finding it at nearly half off) since full profile switches have always felt really bad to me, regardless of tactility.

There have definitely been some welcome changes with the new keyboard, it feels much more premium than other keyboards I have used despite being cheaper than the closest equivalent (MX Keys Mini), and the interchangeable keys are really nice. Logitech's approach of printing both Mac and Windows legends on to keys is reasonable, but having both sets of keycaps in the box and taking a couple minutes to swap to what I'll actually use feels better and cleaner. I don't particularly plan on customizing the looks of the keyboard either, but it's nice to have the option. I also get the appeal of mechanical keyboards for gaming to a certain extent (although I think linear switches are supposed to be better there?), each key press does feel nicer.

All that said, I do find the keyboard to be a worse typing experience. I type more slowly when compared to the scissor switches and make more mistakes in the process. I also still find myself going right past the actuation bump and bottoming out the keys with nearly every key press. Maybe I've developed and reinforced bad habits over years of typing; I've never typed "correctly" (or held my pencil properly for that manner) but I've seemingly gotten away with it just fine on every other keyboard I've used. Maybe there's a learning curve to be expected, but my WPM is no better now than it was the day I unboxed the keyboard two weeks ago.

I do expect I'll stick with mechanical keyboards, at least on my personal machine. I want to get a keyboard with a numpad again and finding premium scissor switch keyboard with both a Windows specific layout¹ and good features is pretty difficult. The MX Keys was on the way out for me since I didn't particularly care for it outside of the switches. I don't want proprietary software for my keyboard (especially since Logitech doesn't make it available on Linux) and it only worked wirelessly so I couldn't even use it to enter the BIOS, plus it took extra time to wake up after my computer. Maybe throwing in some intentional keyboarding practice on top of writing code and these blog posts is what I need, or maybe I just need some higher actuation force switches. While this introduction to mechanical keyboards hasn't been all that I hoped it would be, I'm glad to have a better feel for what I like in keyboards.