Deth

It’s been nearly two months now since I bought and received my Keychron Q6. This keyboard has been a dream come true for typing. It feels good. Typing just feels right on this one. My previous one, the Corsair, just never felt right to me.

The key caps feel solid, and I am still using the stock ones that came installed in the keyboard. I haven’t decided yet whether I want to try other ones or not. There’s plenty of time for that, though. I have seen some cool-looking ones that I like, but I haven’t pulled the trigger and ordered anything. For me, I am more concerned with how they feel than I am with how they look. Of course, neat ones would be great to have, but not if they feel worse.

The version that I purchased came with brown switches. I have to say that I am pleased with the way these switches feel. They have a very satisfying “click” feel to them while typing, but at the same time, they are fairly quiet. Personally, I’d love a nice, loud, and satisfying click. At the same time, I’d rather have something quieter to not wake up my girlfriend if she’s sleeping in the other room on one of those nights that I am unable to sleep. They feel really good to me and that’s the most important factor.

The switches are hot swappable, so I have explored the idea of changing them to something else, but not seriously yet. One of these days, I most likely will, but I am in no hurry to do so. It’s a great option to have. I enjoy tinkering with things, and while I probably could have soldered in ones, it would be risky and frustrating with my low vision. Sometime I will order one of those switch test kits, or maybe just a pack of them to swap out on the keyboard itself, to see if there’s anything I like better.

The keyboard is heavy and feels as solid as a rock. That’s part of why it feels so good to type on for me. It doesn’t move at all. Even bumping it accidentally doesn’t make it slide around on my desk. The old Corsair one I had felt flimsy, even though it was also pretty heavy.

Unfortunately, I cannot use the app to change the settings of the keyboard in Firefox. I am actually okay with that, though. The browser, in my opinion, does not need to have access to the lower-level USB stuff. I don’t want an operating system on top of another operating system. All the extra stuff in Chrome-based browsers is just Google forcing their tentacles deeper in, trying to find more ways to track and force ads. That’s not a good thing. When I used the app, it was nicer than that electron bloat that Corsair used with the crappy UI. This new keyboard remembers the settings better than the old one did, too.

The other nice thing is that this one has keyboard shortcuts to change settings. The Corsair had that too, but I never remembered the key combinations, and the way it would lose my settings was frustrating.

This Keychron keyboard has a more natural feel to the layout. It does not have the weird space bar like the Corsair did. The space bar feels very solid too, I might add. Having the normal key sizes means that the modifier keys are where I expect them to be. I never got that right on the old one. Years of touch typing aren’t easy to unlearn. That’s why I never tried learning a newer and more efficient key layout. I’ve thought about it, but I never pursued it. I’ve been touch-typing using QWERTY for forty years. That muscle memory is set in stone.