Hey all,
With the dearth of Topre keycaps, and the dwindling varieties of Topre keyboards still on the market (HHKB, a few RealForce, TypeHeaven, FC660C), are we shooting ourselves in the foot collecting Topre keycaps? Especially the artisan ones?
With the Novatouch coming out soon with Topre switches but MX sliders, Topre keycaps won't fit.
With the availability of community-originated MX sliders for Topre switches, and possibly commercially made equivalents one day, even existing Topre keyboards can be converted for MX keycaps.
Yes, it is unlikely that an existing Topre board will give up the ghost any time soon, but most new boards would be MX or Topre with MX-compatible stems.
So are we shooting ourselves in our feet collecting Topre keycaps?
Or would it be better to collect MX custom keycaps now, and invest in some MX sliders for existing Topre keyboards?
I
think that cooler master owns the rights for the topre-mx sliiders switch for a while, so at least initially there wont be a lot (any?) variety when it comes to those keyboards. For this reason I think that Topre caps are still relevant in the short term. For the long term, who knows? I think a lot can change by the time this is relevant.
It will be interesting to see if the novatouch sliders can be transplanted into other boards (coughHHKBcough).