But its only a Keyboard 🖮

As a developer I spend a lot of time in front of my keyboard, but until recently I paid it very little attention. Sure, I have a decent mechanical keyboard at home (a Corsair K70) that has served me well. Really well in fact, it's a great keyboard for development and gaming.

However, since the start of the year I've found myself being drawn more towards the custom mechanical keyboard community, and my current drive to become more efficient with my coding by using more shortcuts has piqued my interest.  

So I started lurking in a couple of places, the Reddit community r/CustomKeyboards, and the forum over at geekhack.org. People on there are doing some amazing work with their boards, like some of these are works of art.

One of the first things that struck me was a big percentage of the builds where 60% keyboards. This essentially means the function keys on the top row are missing, there's no number pad and no dedicated arrow keys. There's also a few TKL (Tenkeyless) layouts that have no number pad, and a few split style.

Decisions, Decisions

So I thought i'd have a try and making my first custom. Now, when you start to look into this you'll soon find that a) lots of the custom stuff people sell are really expensive and b) you have to wait ages to get your gear. Especially if you go for a group buy. As i'm not sure what the best layout for me really is, i don't want to start dropping hundreds of pound on something quite yet, so with that in mind I started looking on the big Chinese retail sites banggood and aliexpress. Now, these dont have anywhere near the best quality gear, but its pretty cheap and there's a good selection.

I'd already decided to have a try with a 60% layout, I loved the look of them, I rarely use my number pad and there was a good selection of base kits. In the end I went with the following

• GK61 Hot Swappable 60% RGB Keyboard from banggood. This was a full kit with a PSB mounted in a case, and the PCB was hot-swappable, so you don't have to solder the switches in, meaning you can change them out if you want
• Gateron Brown Switch from banggood. I use cherry reds at the moment, this have a nice feel to them but are maybe slightly loud. The Gateron's are slightly less 'clicky' but should still have the same feel. Also they are the same size as the cherry so most keycaps will fit
• PTB Joker ANSI Keycaps from Ebay. There was loads of group buy kits I was looking at, but most of those would take 3-4 months to get here, and would cost about £90. I wanted something now, i like the way these looked and they shone through so you could see the RGB so I decided to spring for these
• The cable. So the keyboard came with a USB-C port, you did get a standard cable with the kit but I opted to make my own. I'll do a post about that at some point.

So that was it, I order all my stuff and sat back. The switches came in about a week, then I waited for the case/PCB kit. And waited, and waited, and waited.....
Now I know ordering from aliexpress/banggood can be a bit hit and miss, but I had to wait about 2 months for the rest of my order to arrive. Yep, 2 months. I was giving up hope and then one day, it just turned up. I think you also need quite a bit of patience to play the custom keyboard game as well

The mail, the mail is here

So finally, I had everything I needed. Building the board was really straight forward, the PCB was already mounted in the case, all i had to do was pop the switch's in, and put the key caps on. The stabilisers where even already in place so that was a nice touch.  See the bottom of the post for some images of the various stages of build

So then, I started using it. I'm actually typing this post on it. First thoughts, for the price I paid, its a good quality board, and the caps are pretty good as well. I'm also enjoying the brown switches, they have good feedback and sound, and I think i prefer them to the red's I've been using for years.  As for the actual layout, I'm not sure I like it. I need to spend a bit more time with it before I commit, but at the moment I find I miss the dedicated arrow keys quite a lot, and its strange not having any F keys as well. But, I'm going to stick with it for now and give it a good try. Watch this space...