MX blacks: random impressions

[Muirium]

Anyway, after all the trauma it's actually a really nice keyboard to use. I've quickly warmed to its extremely minimalist appearance, which is... well, not steampunk but a bit Max Headroom.

Definitely see what you mean…



A board o' parts like that would drive me up the pinstriped wall, but whatever works for you!

Speaking of alternate SA arrow keys: I definitely have a fair few. All Round 5 style, of course. But say you were limited to those Honeywell colours: which ones would you choose?

[vometia]

Oh, that's a tough one: I dunno, really. I find myself gravitating towards the white-on-red but might that be garish with a pastel-green-and-grey keyboard? Sometimes my approach to aesthetics is try it and see; and sometimes it works... and often it doesn't!

I'm liking the keyboard more and more except for the tendency of my fingers to keep getting lost. Okay, more lost: that's why the potential absence of one of the delete keys would've been so disastrous! But the looks, solidity and feel have won me over in spite of my initial "argh" about things going wrong. I just hope I never need to dismantle it.

[vometia]

I wish my fingers weren't so slow to retrain. I still feel like I'm no closer to getting used to the more amenable positioning of control, for instance, and the editing keys are still causing me pain: as I'm not a touch-typist, I've long since used the edge of the main block of keys to position my right hand which is why I'm getting that transposed-one-to-the-right that I've mentioned. I think the incidence is reducing a bit but is still too frequent.

The other thing with the editing keys is that I've evidently been using the same "technique" there, too, so I now find myself repeatedly hitting backspace instead of home, with the obviously annoying effects when using the keyboard to browse: I still prefer that even if one of my motivations for wanting a smaller keyboard is to make the mouse less likely to collide with it when I'm gaming! And likewise, repeatedly finding home instead of page-up and so on, and never being able to find my print-screen key. I wish it was possible to move the Race's pn button somewhere else as it's occupying a prime location for something much more useful but so far my attempts to rebind it have been unsuccessful.

I'm wondering if I wouldn't be better off replacing the row of editing keys with something of a smaller profile, though I suspect I would be perpetually unhappy with the weird aesthetics and inconsistent feel so it's probably better if I just wait until I get used to it. However long that will take...

[vometia]

A very random observation, which I only notice after "lights out" (yeah I know it's only 6pm here, but I have insomnia and I've been up since 2:20am, so I'm knackered).

Not so much about the keyboard, which I am really enjoying other than the finger retraining which is still not really developing very much, but more about the keycaps. The PMK Lime is an ABS set and as such it'll go shiny after a while. I don't really mind one way or the other but the screen reflecting off them has given some interesting revelations, the biggest of which is that the backspace key is definitely not my "most used" and is actually still slightly matt, or at least satin, but the shiniest by far is the left-shift key. I dare say a part of that is because I'm less likely to hit it straight on due to my random typing technique and I suppose it does sort of make sense, but it was a bit of an eye-opener. Of the bottom row, the other shiny keys are CVBNM, with \ZX looking fairly neglected in spite of me being a Unix hacker. I guess the reality is that I still spent most of my time waffling on about nothing in particular.

[Muirium]

See what I mean about Left Shift? I always shine it on ABS, too, and always did. It’s a super heavy use key! And I do so like it ANSI sized, instead of a little ISO sliver. I’ll take a small spacebar any day—I only ever use it with my right thumb, under B, N and M—but don’t shrink Left Shift on me. That’s my main one! The 1.75u Right Shift trick on HHKB hasn’t ever troubled me.

Speaking of habits: come on, adapting to something new and different? You? Really…

[vometia]

Oddly enough, I don't object to the tiny shift all that much! Which I admit seems inconsistent given my hatred of the small ANSI return thing, and I don't seem to have much of an explanation. Occasionally I adapt to things, though usually after a huge struggle, and at that point it often becomes The Best Thing Evar™. But keyboards have always been a bit of a gnarly subject and I never found a layout I particularly liked until I encountered the LK201. In spite of its beigeness, rubber domes, weird function keys and that LK seems to stand for "Long Keyboard".