Apologies for the grotesque thread necromancy, but a lot of stuff that's been going through my mind was discussed here and I figured I'd belatedly resume the discussion rather than retread old ground (which I'll probably end up doing anyway.
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After years of curiosity about the MX switches, not really satiated by getting one of those little key-testers, I've ended up with a Filco Majestouch 2 tenkeyless with MX Blues. I'm trying to qualify that with a reason, considering I've been happily using my Unicomp SSK for years. Erm... because I like keyboards is about the best I can come up with. Ultimately I'll probably go back to the Model M, but I fancied a change.
First impressions are that the Filco seems better made than the Unicomp: there's no flex
at all and it's very heavy and solid. I'm not quite so convinced about the sound, though the gentler clicking is probably easier to live with than the CLUNKCLUNKCLUNK you get with buckling springs. Key feel... dunno, there's a bit of an apples and oranges thing going on they're: they're just different. I'm pleased that the blues are a little weightier than expected, I was a bit nervous about having a similar experience to "
that Philips terminal" I used 25 years back with the real hair-trigger keys: dunno what switches it used, I suspect some sort of linear Cherry types possibly, but that is just a guess. Anyway, the Filco is nothing like that. Which is a huge relief.
Other nice things are that I'm not condemned to a world of beige, and it's nice that it's as small as it's possible to get while still having a regular, full-size layout, although I now realise I had a habit of resting my left hand on the surround of the SSK where it now just finds a pointy corner digging into it! But "less is more", especially as it'll involve less chance of my mouse colliding with the keyboard when I'm gaming, a bad habit I've never managed to get out of.
I'm ambivalent about the extra Windows keys: I thought by not having them I was missing out, but so far haven't found a use for them and they've just filled in the spaces I absent-mindedly used for hand-positioning. Maybe I'll figure out how to configure them as additional compose keys or something, so I can more easily produce, say, Greek characters. Not that I ever use Greek, but y'know, sometimes you just need to be able to do something because you can.
The only thing I dislike so far is the key-tops. Well, "dislike" is going a bit far, they just don't seem to be quite up to the quality of the rest of the keyboard, and for some reason I dislike having small legends squashed up in the corner. They're also printed rather than... well, anything that isn't printed, which seems oddly cheap and of questionable resilience. So I've ordered some of the Filco double-shots, as much as dark brown-on-black isn't necessarily the most aesthetic of combinations: they've had good reviews though (provided I don't get a duff set) and are apparently nicely heavy, a bit retro-looking, no bumpy legends and are, well, doubleshots. They should arrive on Monday: key-puller at the ready...
And what of the competition? Well everyone says that Topre is Teh Best™ and I may well put that to the test one day, but that day is not today. Besides, Topres don't click and I like clickiness. Going right back to the days of the early '80s home micro boom, I always preferred the clickier ones like the Acorns (actually I preferred the Electron over the BBC, even though everyone says the Electron is supposedly inferior; but then again I also found the Dragon's keyboard remarkably similar to the BBC's, in spite of everyone saying it was rubbish. I think it was probably the same "everyone" though. But I digress...) over the good but somewhat damped feeling of, say, the Commode 64. I think I found my natural home when I first encountered a Model M, rather curiously on a Dell Optiplex. Maybe I'm just anti-social. Maybe it's because I'm a bass player. I just seem to like loud.
And as far as I can tell, the Filco is as good an example of a Cherry MX as I'm likely to find. There are other examples out there which do fancier stuff, but as much as I kinda like the idea of rainbow backlighting I know I'd get bored of it after about 30 seconds of playing around with it. So Filco it is. The only potential downer is one it shares with the SSK which is that some applications insist on having a numeric keypad and life's too short to spend it doing key remapping, so maybe I'll just have to invest in an external keypad one day; I'm certainly not going back to the days of the LK201 and its descendants that took up my entire desk, though.
PS Oh, and though it's already quite obvious with my whittering about legends, I didn't get a ninja model: that would just be a nightmare. I've been regularly typing for 35 years but I find my touch typing is still too random to get on with something like that.
