A new year is coming, time to clean some things up, take some things out to the trash, and of course, get a bunch of new stuff.
For me this year, that meant getting a Mac Mini to replace my 2014 Macbook Pro. The Mini is a small, sleek, silver technological lozenge that doesn’t take up much desk-space, but does require you to supply all the peripherals, all of the things that make a computer a tool and a toy, rather than merely a box that produces heat: mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
The mouse and monitor roles were already filled, so along with the new Mac I got a new mechanical keyboard. This is not the first mechanical keyboard I’ve had, but the first from this particular manufacturer (Keychron). This is not going to be a review of that product specifically, which I found after doing a minimal amount of searching for mechanical keyboards for Macs; rather, I will do some reflecting on why this particular type of keyboard is loved by programmers and other computer users, myself included.
Even without getting into anything that you would call AR or VR, computers contain virtual worlds, worlds in which you can do things that are impossible in meatspace: create a perfect line, rectangle or circle; fight orcs and dragons; call up the definition of any word instantly. But to do any of these things, you need a way to translate between your intentions and the signals that a computer can work with. Because we are not quite yet cyborgs—our phones are not actually attached to us, just always with us—we have mice and keyboards (and touch-screens and tablets and voice command interfaces as well, but for the present discussion I am going to focus on the classic input devices).
Many computer users don’t give much thought to these peripherals; for the average office worker, a mouse is a mouse is a mouse. But as you would expect of the people who take technology seriously, the coders and gamers, there are people who put a lot of thought into the devices they routinely use to interact with a computer, people who are looking for the more responsive mouse, the more productive keyboard.
One way that keyboards in particular differ is in how the keys are activated on a keypress. The more common kind are the membrane or “chiclet” keyboards, the mushy keys you will find on the average laptop. That is fine for the hoi polloi, but for discerning computer user there are mechanical keyboards, so called because they use mechanical switches to activate keypresses.
So why is this a thing? What do I care how my keyboard works, as long as the right character shows up on the screen when I hit a key?
The answer is that the mechanical nature of these switches, of which there are many varieties, allows for the possibility of adding audible feedback to the action of pressing a key, in the form of a clicking sound caused by the switch, as well as tactile feedback as you feel a “clack” with each keypress. Depending on the type of switch, you can have the tactile feel, the audible click, both or neither, according to your preferences.
While you can do many sophisticated things with a computer, it has only two channels of output: audio and video. For most applications this is enough, as these are the sensory modalities that we rely on the most. While we do engage our hands for input—although limited to palms and fingertips—computer output is entirely devoid of tactile feedback.
Consider that tools have, since someone first figured out how to sharpen the end of a stick with a sharp rock, been things that you held in your hand. Manual manipulation has, for millennia, been how we used tools, from those used to build things to those used to create art: hammers, chisels, saws, pencils, pens, paintbrushes. But a mouse and keyboard don’t provide much in the way of tactile feedback; they always have the same smooth, plastic feel. You cannot judge how heavy, how hard, pliant, wet, fuzzy, or sticky something you are manipulating on the screen is, you must infer these properties from audio and visual clues. This is a whole category of information that is entirely missing from our interactions with computers.
Without weight, without substance, the things on the screen are ephemeral, appearing and disappearing, moving through each other like phantoms.
So computer interaction does not include this entire category of feedback, and while virtual reality is improving, and there is such a thing as haptics, it is likely that the audio and visual channels of communication will continue to be the primary means of human/computer interaction.
What mechanical keyboards give you is just a little bit of that missing tactile feedback in our interactions with computers. They give you a feel for what you are doing.
There is nothing natural about the sensation of a key press; it is what the interaction design expert Alan Cooper, in his book About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, termed an idiomatic interface. That is, it is not meant to mimic or mirror anything from the real world, but rather create an association that is arbitrary but easy to pick up and use. The important thing is just that mechanical keyboards, in a way, provide a bridge between physical and digital through the sensation and sound they add to a keypress.
So this is what I like about mechanical keyboards, and why they are popular among the computer cognoscenti. In fact, mechanical keyboards are their own rabbit-hole, and real enthusiasts can tell you the differences between the red, blue, and brown Cherry switches and build custom keyboards out of modular parts as a hobby. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able get into them to that degree, but I am a fan, for the reasons given above, and can recommend giving them a try if you spend a lot of time hitting keys with your fingertips, and are interested in how you can make that experience better.