Mechanical Keyboards

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What switches and key caps should I get? (lemm.ee)

submitted 10 months ago by penquin@lemm.ee to c/mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml

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Hi all, I have a quick and possibly very simple question. I have a keychron V6 with red switches being delivered to me tomorrow. I just want to know what switches and keycaps will fit this keyboard? This is my very first mechanical/swappable keyboard and I know nothing about it. I want to try other switches, mainly brown, blue and yellow. Also want to have a different look keycaps every now and then. I've searched on their site, but I had no idea which ones to choose. lol Thanks in advance.

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[–] HidingCat@kbin.social 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Keycaps are easy, anything MX compatible (which is like most of them) will work. Since the V6 is a 100% it's even easier, since it's a standard layout and you don't need to look for extended keycap sets that have keys to correspond to certain layout types.

Switches you need to just bite the bullet every now and then. A tester only will get you so far. Expect to make a few regretful purchases from time to time.

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Thank you. That's basically what I realized. Watching youtube videos and having a tester won't cut it, as switches tend to sound different on different keyboards. So, like you said I'll probably be buying a couple of sets that I won't like until I find something that works for me. As for the key caps. The only issue I'm facing at the moment is finding the actual keychron ones. The keychron ones have double legends (is that what the letters are called on caps?) Like on the F buttons, it shows the F and another icon like the sound or mute etc. I couldn't find any set that has that. Also, above the numpad there are 4 extra keys that I really like, circle, square, triangle and an X and I'm not sure what to replace those with.

[–] HidingCat@kbin.social 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The 4 icons are just for you to customise with.

Double legends are meaningless on a fully programmable keyboard. Just use VIA and take a screenshot of your layers if you're worried about forgetting.

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I actually used VIA to assign a function for each of those 4 keys. Very handy. And yeah, I agree now, those double legends aren't really that important anymore since I can customize anything. There is one thing I don't understand on VIA, layers where when you hover over a button it explains it to you. That makes no sense to me. Time to watch some YouTube I guess.

[–] HidingCat@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There is one thing I don’t understand on VIA, layers where when you hover over a button it explains it to you.

Eh, what do you mean? And isn't that good?

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What I mean is I don't understand layers on the app. Still, the app is amazing, and I really appreciate the fact that it fully supports Linux.

[–] HidingCat@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Keychron right? There should be four layers. 0 and 1 are for when the keyboard is set to Mac, 2 and 3 when it is set to Windows.

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yes, keychron. I know about 0 1 2 3, but what I'm talking about is the section in the app where it says "Layers" then it has squares with F1s and F3s and so on.

[–] HidingCat@kbin.social 2 points 10 months ago

Oh! They're the ways you can configure a key to interact with layers! The hover usually is quite self-explanatory. But yes, might want to do a search if some of them are not clear.

There's actually a lot you can do; If you ever feel like VIA can't let you do something, you can actually program strings directly with the "Any" key in the "Special" category. That lets you directly enter QMK keycodes, and you can set up pretty nifty functions if you want to. That's definitely a long read or video for another time though.