Hi there! I'm bumping the Ol'zombie thread because I am very VERY eager to know of any development in the matter of swiss layout.
Are old cherry keyboards still the only source of good keycaps?
Any good board recomendation?
Thanks!
This isn't a definitive answer by any means, since I don't keep up with
every new keycap offering/GB. So please take what I say with a pinch of salt, and hopefully someone will suggest something I'm unaware of.
From what I gather, your only options for 'readily available' Swiss keycaps would be a
custom set from WASDkeyboards (just an example - you can design your own) or a backlit set from
MAXkeyboard. I don't think anyone here would try and claim these keycaps are great though. They'll do the job, but they're not the best.
In regards to more "high quality" keysets like GMK, MT3, etc. it's very easy to find an ISO set, but I haven't seen a single set with Swiss layout support. It's understandable, since ISO alone gets less attention than ANSI, nevermind specific regional layouts. Swiss, as I'm sure you know, is far more niche than German or French as well. So, as far as high quality keysets go, you're still pretty much limited to original Cherry. I'm going to post a few examples I know of below to give you an idea of the variants. These are incredibly rare in Swiss layout though, so don't expect to find one quickly (or for a cheap price).
Thick, doubleshot ABS (first letter H) :
G80-3036HACG80-3036HAMCH (pictured with Russian stickers which are not a part of the original keyboard)G80-3000HACThick, dyesub PBT, my personal favourite (first letter S) :
G81-3077SACG81-3081SACTo boil it down to 2 rules :
You're looking for article numbers which contain either
G80 or
G81 at the start. This corresponds to MX or MY switches respectively. The keycaps used for MY keyboards are MX compatible (winkey layout has non-compatible modifiers, but that's unimportant for the Swiss layout keys).
For article numbers with 3 letters following the 4 digit number, you're looking for the last letter to be
C e.g G80-3000HA
C. For article numbers with 5 letters following the 4 digit number, you're looking for the last 2 letters to be
CH e.g G80-3036HAM
CH. These letters dictate the layout, and C/CH specifies Swiss layout.