Burn it with fire man, burn it with fire. The first thing I do on weird keyboards such as these is drop the tilde. I don't use that ****. That is now an escape. Even if it sometimes still looks like a tilde, it's escape.
I may just do that, partly since my f107 has some yellow APL set on it. Sounds like I may just be able to wait on changing caps until the F reproduction caps are ready though too. I have one printed pearl/pebble set on order, should probably pick up a few more.
there is no options in 122
NMB "Space Invaders" is available in a really nice 122-key board, if you like ISO Enter (it can't be modified to ANSI like ancient IBM iron), plus, if my memory serves me well, it has a standard PS/2 connector.
I have seen those for sale for pretty reasonable prices. Space invaders are a lot nicer than Cherry MX in my opinion, that's about the extent of it though. Gateron and Outemu clickies give them a run for their money and box clickies are a lot better if you ask me.
I have seen some F122s for surprisingly sane prices on Ebay recently, even at buy-it-now prices. They were still well over $200 though.
Okay here's mine.
I like low-profile switches better. I would rather have my fingers be traveling less to type each letter.
Currently still using a regular mechy though, having the satisfying feel and sound is loads better than my typing speed on a flat chicklet keyboard. But I do wish there were more options for low profile switches. What I want just doesn't seem to exist right now.
I've been thinking about figuring out how to design my own.. but I have no idea what to do after I have an actual design. I wouldn't want to spend that much time without knowing if I could actually make them.
I think more people would consider this reasonable if there were enough low-profile switches. Kailh's Choc switches seem pretty nice to me, but all I care about are clickies.
Is there something in the way of making more low-profile switches? Like some kind of difficult engineering barrier? Or is it just a matter of someone making a new switch? I feel like there is market for it, but I could be wrong. I kinda wish I could just design my own and be done with it
Well, I imagine the size is a factor. Part of the motivation for IBM to go from beam spring to buckling spring is because some nebulous authority mandated switches of no more than a specific height. I forget what that authority was. Prior to that, if you look at switches up to the late 70s, they're all very tall. Manufacturers had to scramble to design shorter switches. Ironically, a lot of them were subsequently marketed as "low-profile" in the 1980s. Today we would think of them as standard height. Everything is a give and a take. If you make a switch shorter, you give up something else. That's the nice thing about clickbars. They're dead simple and don't require much of any vertical space, but you still lose overall travel, which a lot of people (including myself) value. For linears there are a lot less challenges involved in overall height, of course.
And then you have the question of why? Besides for in use in laptops, why do we need shorter-than-standard switches? What use case necessitates that compromise? If the only answer to that question is a preference for a shorter-traveling switch, then there's little motivation for development because there will be little demand.
Have you tried installing o-rings? I never liked the Rosewill ones I tried years ago because they made for a mushy bottom out, but I have heard that more modern ones can be better with that. They will, by design, reduce travel. I imagine you could try to jerry rig some kind of shims as well, like a relatively thin spacer or something.
