In recent years, mechanical gaming keyboards have become massively popular – as well as their smaller, shortened sisters. It really is a strange animal!
If we were to look for the really fundamental difference between console gaming and PC master race, then it is the fact that on console you play almost exclusively with a controller, while PC uses a combination of keyboard and mouse. This leads to all sorts of design differences and problems, because they are vastly different systems – and while you can theoretically use a keyboard on a console and play on a PC with a controller, practically no one does.
Of the keyboard-mouse pair, it was considered the only important mouse for a long time. Any keyboard will do for gaming, right? The main thing is that it is not wireless, because for a long time they suffered from the problem of falling asleep quickly, and this generated lag. Then it turned out that gamers like mechanical keyboards, which became a certain standard of durability and certainty. Instead of roughly 10 million hits, they promise up to 50 million hits – and that’s just the beginning.
Mechanical keyboards feel better to gamers because of one feature that makes them significantly worse for typing. They have a high switching point, at the beginning of their travel path, which means they switch earlier and this gives the impression that they are generally faster. The disadvantage of switching at the top is that if you change your mind about the movement or just press the key, there is no switching with a classic keyboard, which means that you have fewer typos. Classic mechanical switches can be like this or poppy, but they all switch in the upper part of the track, so you will probably make the same number of typos on them regardless of their “color”. That’s why I personally much prefer older conventional keyboards for typing.
Large mechanical keyboards are largely a matter of individual preference – I can’t rule out that someone just likes them. A much different thing are the shortened keyboards, which seem to be experimenting with how much they can be shrunk. This makes a lot of sense, because the less space the keyboard takes up, the more room there is for the mouse.
Traditional classic IBM keyboards are huge – and ergonomically speaking, if you place them with the alphanumeric part directly in front of you, you have a numeric pad in the places where a right-handed person grips the mouse. Early PCs didn’t use a mouse often, so it didn’t matter – but the IBM Model M is almost half a meter, so if you have a classic computer desk that has a 60-80 cm wide top, you really don’t have much room for a mouse.
The solution to the problem of how to get as much space as possible for a mouse on a small table is threefold. The first is to increase the sensitivity of the mouse and thus use less mouse movement for larger maneuvers, which is said to be done by gaming professionals, but not ideal for people who have a bit of a shaky hand. The second solution is to reduce the size of the keyboard, so you reach for one that does not have a numeric pad (eighty percent), does not have a numeric pad and cursor blocks (seventy-five percent), or is an even more reduced puppy.
A third solution is specialized gaming keyboards that are literally half the size. Initially, there were specialized commanders and controllers, the most bizarre of which was probably the Microsoft Sidewinder Strategic Commander (2001). The undoubtedly original device had a large hat that allowed panning and rotating of the map and a set of shift buttons. This particular attempt at a controller was somewhat over-engineered and also expensive. Like other “left-handed designed controllers”, it required configuration software to function.
