For a long time my keyboard of Choice was a Razor Black Widow from around 2017. It’s not a perfect keyboard, and many in the keyboard enthusiast community would probably call it a joke with Razor’s green key switches being a Cherry MX Blue clone by Kalih, with little change. But that never bothered me, I’m a gamer and the feeling of a mechanical switch, even one as harsh and clicky as the Greens were never bothered me. So when my recently acquired puppy chewed the cable to the keyboard, causing it to have a nasty short, the natural option was to get one with a similar switch. But gaming keyboards are expensive, and depending on who you ask, overpriced. So a new Razor keyboard wasn’t quite in the cards, which meant it was time to do some research. Research that’d bring me down a rabbit hole that may have altered my perspective on all keyboards permanently.
The keyboard enthusiast community had grown substantially since my last delve into finding a keyboard. Manufacturers too had caught on that people desire choice in their products, at least in the key switch department. And while I knew that many loved the classic IBM model M keyboards, I felt that getting one of those was a little out of my budget for an impromptu replacement (Though, one day I will have one). When I had last shopped keyboards you couldn’t select what kind of key switch you wanted on it, though you could go into a retailer and try it out. Now you could have most boards, especially the cheap ones, with typically an assortment of three types of switches, Blue, Brown, and Red. These colors are all correlated to the original Cherry MX switches of the same name and color, but are usually (especially on the cheaper boards ) a knockoff.
But me being me, I decided another potential hobby sounded nice, and that maybe trying a bunch of switches is a good idea. And so I made a list of things I needed in a keyboard. Removable Cable (To replace it incase of puppy accident), Hot swappable switches (Because even though I know how to solder, I am not willing to do a whole keyboard with the cheap kit I have), and comes with Blue switches (So I can have a baseline of something close to what I liked). My first victim of what I’d swap into was chosen at the recommendation of a keyboard enthusiast blog, under their “for gamer” section was the Gateron Milky Yellows. So with my budget of $100, I fit in a Keychron C2 kit with the Gateron Blue switches, and a bag of Milky Yellow. Oh and some Super Lube to try out what enthusiasts call “lubing switches”
And so, now that I’ve told the story I think I’ll end this post off with a bunch of recordings of the keyboard + the two switch types I bought + them lubed. Also I ended up liking the Milky Yellows a lot, even without a click their smoothness + the deep thud I get from bottoming out on the keyboard was satisfying enough to me.