- I think it's very interesting to use vintage keycaps with secondary legends where I imagine their prior use in some industry or line of work that's very different from mine. It's a bit like pieces of history (whether original keysets or reproductions, like Retro with PETSCII side print) to ponder.
I shall soften my position to include this. If it's a borrowed set from a genuinely useful original tool, I'm down with that. If it's a newly produced set with no historic provenance, it feels like putting those fake airlift handles on the Hummer H3. It's a crappy vehicle which they managed to make worse by all the fakery.
Yes:
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(http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160206/69f0e1af5e6c2282e2a5c14c855a3b25.jpg)
No:
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(http://www.hummerpartsclub.com/mm5/graphics/00000001/H30020-HoodHandles_lg.jpg)
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(http://i913.photobucket.com/albums/ac336/DHunter_bucket/DAH_7501.jpg)
TLDR: if it's genuine historic customisation that happens to look cool, fine. If it's deliberate fakery forced to look cool, no thank you.
Ok, so you're saying that taking vintage caps with secondary legends and putting them on a modern keyboard is okay? That already weakens the argument (and I don't think the car analogy is completely appropriate--for some weird reason cars are the most overused analogy in just about every single hobby, including photography when comparing gear, and clearly not everything is like it is with cars), because now you're putting original on non-original. What if the original caps are tall sphericals, and the new caps are also tall sphericals that look as much the same as possible but also have a stem and keycap size that's able to work with modern switches? Many vintage caps from beamspring keyboards (for example) don't work on modern switches. So if one wants to use those caps, one has to either rewire the original keyboard to work or else mod every keycap stem. If you want no references from other cultures / other uses, you should probably never wear cargo pants unless you're a carpenter or in construction and need to wear a hammer strapped to your leg, have any artwork on your walls that's not made by you (and it better not be derivative or influenced by others' art)--especially not prints of reproductions of original art put in whichever modern frames and used out of context, etc.