To All the Keyboards I've Loved Before | Natallia Valadzko

I can’t finish thi-

To All The Keyboards I’ve Loved Before

Creamy, silky, smooth, crisp, deep, mushy, and also… thocky? What can all these specific adjectives even be used to describe? The title of the article won’t allow me to leave anyone in suspense: it is the sound of a mechanical keyboard.

These days, for some people, the way a keyboard sounds might be one of the deciding factors in choosing their peripheral device, besides the obvious compatibility or aesthetics. Not so long ago, a quieter typing experience was the selling point of many keyboard and laptop manufacturers. Currently, however, some would consider the near-silent outcome to be “without character” or just plain boring. This quiet typing is a property of a membrane keyboard that has one thin layer of silicone serving as the electrical contact point. It was introduced in the mid-90s because of its cheap production method, which was perfect for the equipment being mass-produced, bought, and used in schools, internet cafés, and offices.

Mechanical keyboards, on the other hand, are famous for their distinct click upon each key press. The difference between membrane and mechanical keyboards is the type of switch used for actuation, that is registering a keystroke. Unlike the layer of silicone (or rubber domes, as its modification), mechanical keyboards use a spring-loaded mechanism to press a physical switch. As a result, instead of a soft and quiet key press, a mechanical keyboard produces a clickable sound and also provides tangible tactile feedback. Basically, because of the nature of these keyboard switches, a membrane would feel soft and “spongy” and sound rubbery and mushy. Meanwhile, mechanical keyboards can boast of delivering a “snappy” tactile response and a wide range of diverse clicks.

Nowadays, there are hours-long ASMR-inducing videos, with hundreds if not millions of views, of people typing away at their clickety mechanical keyboards. While writing this, I am listening to one such video myself. Surprisingly, it turned out to be the perfect background noise for researching and writing. Unsurprisingly, I got an urge to get a mechanical keyboard for myself. And I am not (and will not be) the only one. In the last few years, the hobby of building your own mechanical keyboard has really taken off. There has always been a small bunch of tech enthusiasts who enjoy customizing every piece of their gear, and yet mechanical keyboard customization has moved past the exclusivity of the tech-savvy.

For many, the hobby of customizing their own mechanical keyboard may have started with a Twitch stream, a YouTube video, or just one TikTok on their “For You” page. Despite all of them being video platforms, each has its own affordances, which results in different usage practices and algorithms for content suggestions. On Twitch, for example, one may come across a stream of a mechanical keyboard enthusiast (and entrepreneur) who is building a keyboard one switch and keycap at a time, while narrating and engaging with the chat in real time. Keyboard content on YouTube, on the other hand, may end up on your feed in the form of ASMR or videos with “desk tour” and “desk makeover” in their titles. A shorter version of similar content may land on your TikTok “For You” page under the hashtags #keeb, #keebtok, or #customkeyboard. In under a minute, you can be presented with a welledited compilation of the typing experience of visually and aurally distinct keyboards for each day of the week, like one of the TikTok clips that was captioned “to all the keyboards I’ve loved before.” Alternatively, the whole clip can be dedicated to one mechanical keyboard with all the custom specifications included in the captions.

Personally, my first encounter with a custom keyboard was seeing a TikTok clip showing the process of changing plain keycaps for the ones that featured realistic character faces from popular video games and various simplified symbols related to them. Surely, video games are not the only inspiration for the keycaps; rather, it is an expected development considering that such sets may be directly sponsored by video game companies. The creativity of keycaps alone is infinite and truly mind-boggling. The keys for Esc, Ctrl, Shift, Alt, Enter, and a spacebar usually stand out from the alphabet keys by havingtheir own color scheme and design. It could feature minimalist contrastive colors or catpaw prints. There is also d e m a n d for artisan keycaps, which are handmade using resin. Mechanical keyboards are not like laptop keyboards with a flat k e y p a d ; i n s t e a d , keycaps for a mechanical keyboard are elevated enough to be able to house a miniature of a Pokémon or a tiny solar system inside the mold of epoxy resin. Among even wilder designs, there is a keyboard whose keycaps are made of artificial grass, which is supposed to impress not only with its visual aesthetics, but also the very peculiar tactile sensations. Glarses, an English YouTuber who is known for his keyboard-related videos, joked that if he could touch grass without going outside, it’d be game-changing.

The visual aesthetics of custom keyboards make use of keycaps, colorful cases and LED lights. However, the sound of a mechanical keyboard, which manages to enchant even the most unsuspecting people, has to do with switches. Mechanical keyboards have several kinds: for example, clicky, tactile, and linear that range in how pronounced the click is after the keystroke. Some keyboard customizers even use a mix of different types of switches to change the feel of certain keys.

The auditory feedback from a mechanical keyboard seems so crucial that a special word has been coined to describe the wondrous, ear-tickling feeling of pressing down a key. “Thoc” or “thocky” is an onomatopoeic word that may act as a measurement of how well different mechanical switches do the job of delivering the unique thoc so many people are craving now. Though there is also a degree of selfirony in the way some enthusiasts showcase their proud collections of clickety-clackety keyboards, as seen in the YouTube video titled “plastic inside a metal rectangle making possible pleasing noises.” While thoc may be a generally useful term, undoubtedly one would need a bigger word bank to capture the subtlety and nuance. For instance, there is a wide range of keyboard videos attracting viewers with such provocative titles as “does this keyboard remind you of raindrops?”, “what it feels like to type on marshmallows”, “raining glass marbles”, “if Krispy Kreme was a keyboard…”, “when its silky n’ smooth... (Turn Vol. Up!)”

You may ask, what could be behind the increasing popularity of mechanical keyboards and the phenomenon of detailed content creation on the topic? Why and why now? Many keyboard experts have pointed out that the pandemic and switching to work from home might have been a trigger, as people were spending a lot more time with their equipment. When your home is also your office, it is possible that you’d want to find ways to switch up your workspace so that it could actually feel like a workplace. Other accounts of people starting the hobby mentioned “being able to feel something through retail therapy” or exercising at least some control by expressing their personality with the help of their PC peripherals, for lack of alternatives. Moreover, platforms like TikTok and YouTube made it very easy to find inspiration from other people sharing their desk setups.

As many “keeb” aficionados point out, there is no endgame; it’s a thocky fall down the rabbit hole. And in the times when technology seems to be increasingly proprietary and massproduced, this journey is prophesied to remain within a small community of designers, hobbyists, and enthusiasts who just enjoy building their own customized keyboards.