Thoughts on switches Part 1: Background History

My first mechanical keyboard after childhood was a Razer Black Widow Ultimate from 2010. It was a beastly board of glossy black plastic, piercing blue LED backlighting, a very gamery aesthetic, and Cherry MX Blue switches. At that point in time the patent on MX switches hadn’t lapsed yet so Cherry was the only major player in town. ALPS had largely disappeared, buckling springs were still hiding in Unicomp boards, but Cherry was the most common source for mechanical keyboard switches. They were certainly a massive step up above the mushy and stiff membrane options that I had been using in the subsequent years since we got rid of our PS/1 based IBM Model M boards at home. I knew at that point, even ignorant of everything else, that I’d never go back to a membrane board again. Over the next several years I largely stuck to that board, though did end up beginning my venture into other keyboards that weren’t full-sized, such as through the Cooler Master Storm boards.

I ended up purchasing one of those CMStorm tenkeyless (board sans keypad section) with Cherry Blue switches again then found out some time later they were due to release a newer variant using the largely unused to that point Cherry MX Green switches. Still clicky, but much stiffer this time at 80g of actuation force versus 60g of the Blue switches. Honestly, I ended up preferring the stiffer keys as I felt I could avoid bottoming them out too due to how heavy they were. That said, they were still Cherry’s click jacket implementation meaning that, in hindsight, the click is rather rattly and has a very plastic sound quality.

That was in 2014 and I largely kept using the same batch of keyboards until 2018 when I started exploring the mechanical keyboard world again. During that period, a lot had changed. Numerous other switch makers had introduced their own clone switches and had in fact moved beyond clones, to making their own designs and using their own choices of materials for the various switch components. Names like Gateron, Kailh, Zeal, and countless others. My first board was another Cherry board, using Cherry MX Red switches. They were my first experience with linear switches and needless to say despite the quality of the board itself (a Ducky something-or-another) the scratchy nature of them just left a soured taste for me. I then opted to try for one of Cherry’s tactile offerings, MX Clear, a heavier alternative to MX Brown.

By this point I had started to get back into the hobby of mechanical keyboards and this was also my first foray into a truly compact keyboard, a KBParadise V60. A 60% keyboard with no function key row, navigation cluster, or number pad. I really loved the feeling of the switches versus what I had used before. The tactility was subtle, but definitely more noticeable than the MX Brown boards I had tried out in Microcenter. Sadly, during a bout with illness that year I also killed the electronics of that board in a tragic soup accident when I was sick. It was at this point I decided to try out my first non-Cherry switches, in the flavor of Kailh Box Pale Blue clicky switches.

Instantly I noticed a gulf in the sound and feel compared to Cherry’s click jacket design for clicky switches. These used a click bar instead, a small metal arm that would produce the sound as well as tactile event both on down stroke and the upstroke. This produced a sharper, more tactile response that was also louder and noticeably metallic in sound versus the more chaotic plastic sound of the click jacket collapsing. Between the two I immediately found preference to the clickbar design from Kailh for both feel and sound. This led to my next keyboard, a Ducky One 2 Mini in white with Kailh Box White switches, a lighter spring and thinner clickbar compared to the Box Pale Blue switches.

By this point I had discovered r/mechanical keyboards and began to really dive more heavily into the more technical aspects of switches. Materials, innovations, looking through data sheets and force diagrams, the works. As such, I wanted to have the option to change switches without soldering. I needed hotswap sockets. Thus, entered my first foray into hotswap keyboards with the Glorious GMMK 60%, in ISO. I opted for ISO for two primary reasons: firstly, to simply try the layout and see how I coped, and secondly, to make typing in other languages easier because of the odd layout issues that would occur when using them on an ANSI board. The result of that is that I’ve come to prefer the ISO layout and loved the move to hotswap so I could begin to test out all sorts of switches from all sorts of manufacturers.

I started with Kailh Speed Bronze, another clickbar based switch with a shorter actuation point of 1.1mm versus 1.8-2.0 for most other switches. That quickly blossomed from there, resulting in my growing collection of switches. I also ended up with another GMMK in TKL (tenkeyless) form factor with ANSI layout.