r/keebgirlies Is Totally a Thing Now
When [coral-bells] posted her first build to r/mechanicalkeyboards, she likely felt some trepidation. After all this is reddit we’re talking about, so right away you’ve got two layers of male-domination hobby.
And so r/keebgirlies was born, and already has a few thousand members. This is a brand-new subreddit for women and non-binary folks who are into mechanical keyboards. As it says in the sidebar, men are welcome but limited to the comments for now, so don’t go trying to post your builds. The girlies are currently seeking moderators, so give that some thought.
As for [coral-bells]’ lovely build, this is an Epomaker MS68 with MMD Vivian V2 switches, and those flowery keycaps are from Etsy. She is currently waiting for supplies to mod a Yunzii AL66, but wants to build a kit at some point.
Bear In Mind That You Can DIY Homing Keys
Ahh, homing keys. F and J, with their little bumps or lines that home your fingers on the… home row. The Kinesis Advantage doesn’t have them, unfortunately, but makes up for it with deep-dish DSA keycaps on the home row that are bright blue against a sea of black.
After trying and failing several ways, [theTechRun] came up with this ball bearing method lovingly outlined in the reddit post. Basically, you draw a line across the keycap where you want the bearings to sit, make indentations with a spring-loaded center punch set on the lowest pressure setting, then use an unfolded paperclip to dab super glue in the divots and set 1/16″ bearings in there. Evidently, two bearings feel nicer than one, and they look cooler, too.
This is a great step-by-step with shopping links for everything but the pencil. [theTechRun] offers a lot of tips as well, like erasing the pencil line before you set the bearings, and using a leveler to mark it in the first place.
The Centerfold: the Rainbow Connection
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Merritt Had Merit
I keep featuring the odd index typewriter here and there because I want you to get the sense of how popular they used to be before the masses had really mastered the keyboard, whatever the layout might have been.
The Merritt index typewriter, which was marketed as “The People’s Type-Writer”, went for a cool $15 in the 1890s until the brand’s demise in 1896. That’s around $500 in 2025 money.
All versions of the Merritt were blindwriters that typed in a linear up-striking fashion. Thanks to a double Shift mechanism, the machine could produce 78 characters. The inking was handled with a couple of rollers. I find the layout intriguing and wonder how fast I could get going on the thing, though it seems like a recipe for a repetitive stress injury.
Interestingly, the Antikey Chop found an ad from 1901 that was placed by a department store. Hamburger & Sons claimed to have acquired “an immense quantity” of Merritts and were offering them for $3.98 and $4.98. They chose to market the machines as “typewriters for those who cannot afford typewriters”, “handy typewriters for tourists”, and “ideal machines for boys and girls”.
This Keyboard Charges Itself
Wireless keyboards are cool and all, but they whole keeping-it-charged thing adds a level of stress that many believe isn’t worth it. After all, what are you supposed to do when your keyboard is dead? Use the — gasp — laptop keyboard? Uh, no. I mean, unless you have a ThinkPad or something; those have pretty nice keyboards, or at least they did a few years ago.
I for one like the paint spatter design, but I wish only three keycaps were green. It’s a nitpick for sure, ignoring the elephant in the room with a sign around its neck that reads ceci n’est pas une ergonomic keyboard.
Bonus: Lenovo also debuted the AdaptX Mouse, a modular affair which appears to be a pretty sweet multi-functional peripheral for those who don’t want to carry too much. It can be a compact mouse, an ergonomic mouse, a travel hub, a memory card holder, and an emergency power bank. Sheesh! Unfortunately, it’s just a proof-of-concept for now. Gauntlet laid?
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.
umm wow this is what every week now?
Yayyy!
Has it not been a regular column for quite a while now?
That Lenovo mouse is dumb.
I’m not an ultralight mouse enjoyer, but making a mouse that is a literal power ‘brick’ smacks of ‘I don’t understand what this device is for or how people use it’ engineering.
The whole point of a travel device is to be fully integrated WHILE being smaller/lighter. There is no way you don’t lose one of its (totally proprietary) parts. After which, you now have a mouse that isn’t useful for travel AND is worse than a regular mouse due to design compromises.
This thing is like a Saturday morning cartoon joke. “Get good oral hygiene WHILE trimming those hedges with the Garden Flosser 2000”
I don’t know if its as dumb as that, a travel mouse that is made rather heavy by including way more battery than it actually needs so it can also play battery bank makes sense to me, not like a mouse actually needs very much juice to run, or lots of volume for the electronics so they are usually full of empty space. There is nothing worse than a mouse so tiny it is ergonomically hell to use, but a heavy mouse really doesn’t matter (within reason anyway – but it is hard to make a mouse of the right sort of size for a human hand so heavy it is actually bad to use). So combining the two getting a heavy mouse of a size you can actually operate comfortable with enough battery capacity to be a useful power bank actually does seem like a good travel option.
The whole modular element is a bit weird but it looks like the entirely functional mouse element in one self contained unit that can just clip into different handles with by the looks of it two pogo pins presumably to connect to the battery in the handle. So if you have a 3d printer or something it might even be the perfect ‘mouse’ for you to mod for your needs if it ever exists.
funny to hear lenovo lauded for their keyboards.
i’m sure they make some good ones. but my lenovo ideapad u150 (2010) — from when they were still called ‘ultrabooks’ — has an extremely bad keyboard. mushy and hard to trigger an event when you want one and easy to trigger one when you don’t. worst laptop keyboard i’ve ever used. the irony is, it still works today, and i use it as a workshop computer. but that keyboard, man. the only thing worse than its keyboard was its trackpad.
i’ve had or used a wide variety of laptops and never met a keyboard like that. even much cheaper brands have never bothered to dredge up a keyboard that awful.
Well, there’s your problem: it’s an Ideapad. I’ve been using Thinkpads since they were still IBM (more than 20 years). When shopping for my 4th one a couple of years ago I thought I’d save a bit of money and tried an Ideapad. Took less than ten seconds to know it stank. No comparison.
Mind, there is still the tradeoff: The thinner Thinkpad X and T series still have short travel compared to the bigger P series. But all still better than the Ideapads.
I’ve bought white a bit of Lenovo stuff in the last few years.
I’m SUPER happy with the computers themselves, considering what I paid for them.
For decades I have used the cheap Dell/HP keyboards and mice that come with every office computer as “throwaway” input devices. The ones that every IT department usually has a whole closet full of, because you replace the machine and monitor in-place, and only bother with the keyboard or mouse when someone breaks them.
I finally ran out of “extras”, and knew I’d be building a few machines for family members soon.
A membrane keyboard and mouse that came with an office machine should be fine for some 6-8 year olds to play Minecraft (and thus leanr the superior M&K control scheme). Right?
$10 for a brand new K&M from a recycler should be fine. Right?
I have literally never used a worse keyboard or mouse.
That is not hyperbole.
The mouse tracks worse than an old ball mouse did when it was dirty, and the clicks are both gummy AND crunchy at the same time.
The keyboards have inconsistent travel, have stability problems even with the regular keys, and manage to feel mushy and crispy. Imagine every key switch was individually mounted on a gummy bear.
They are so bad that I looked to see if they were recalled, or if there were a bunch complaints about them circa 2018ish.
When that turned up nothing, I took one of each apart to see if the plastic or membranes were breaking down. Nope.
Were they counterfeit? Nope, even the inside boards and little parts had the correct part numbers.
I just cannot imagine them making tens (hundreds?) of thousands of these things and it not causing office riots.
yeah i marvel at the modern pc keyboard market too. like 1995-2005, i reliably bought the cheapest most generic pc-104 keyboard and it was always ‘alright’. but since 2005 i have bought keyboards by a variety of metrics and most of them were nearly unusable. i don’t understand how the $15 membrane keyboard was perfected in 1995 and then somehow our civilization lost that knowledge???
so i gave in and my kid plays minecraft with a $100 ‘mechanical’ keyboard from logitech :/
Why would anyone spend more than $20 on a keyboard is beehive me. This device is used for typing on a computer, nothing more, nothing less. No need to waste money because over time it gets covered in food residue, grime, semen etc. When my logitech gets too dirty I’ll just throw it out and buy a new one at Auchan. Mechanical keyboards are stupid and expensive.
Why would anyone spend more than $20 dollars on their bed? You use it for sleeping on, you’re not even awake, and it gets dirty! I just use a piece of cardboard and a blanket and I just throw it away when it’s dirty.
Save even more by using more cardboard, or just newspaper, instead of a blanket.
And why waste money on a house when you could sleep on your cardboard in a shop doorway.
Well well well, get a load of Mr fancy pants here with a doorway!
A load a day keeps doctors away 😛
Surely there’s a cardboard keyboard out there somewhere.
you’re joking but i sleep on a cot because it’s most comfortable for me, and it’s dying after a few years because it’s not made for everyday use, and so i’ve been struggling to build my own cot…but i just found out temu will sell me a replacement cot for $30. not quite $20, but for real $30 for a bed. wow
That you do not feel the difference does not mean nobody else can. I have used the rubberdome keyboard I got with my first computer for about twenty years, typing for a living 2500-3000 words per working day, and when I finally made the switch (passing the old one to my son), I honestly wished I did it ten years earlier (I guess buying a new one after ten years would still satisfy my frugality).
I used to have a cheap keyboard. Or rather, I used to have cheap keyboards. Keys would systematically get mushy and text rubbed off after 1 year, 2 max. So I spent 4 times more on a mechanical keyboard, and it already lasted 5 times longer with no loss in legibility or keystroke feel.
You can get cromulant mechanical keyboards for $20 these days, maybe even build your own using RP2040 for interfacing.
Not to take the bait or anything, but it’s very easy to justify spending more money on something you use every single day (because cost per use ends up so low), and/or something that interacts with your body (because even a small improvement in comfort can feel extremely worthwhile). A keyboard is both.
Sheesh, how snobby are the keyboard addicted at Reddit? Who the heck is gatekeeping keyboards?
I gave away my Model M because I didn’t like it. I love my Microsoft Sculpt devices, but I’m not interested in forcing other people to like them. (But I’m glad somebody allegedly picked up the manufacturing when MS disco’ed it because they can’t last much more than 8 years, right?)c
I mean, yeah, that one with all of the curly-cue flowery stuff seems totally weird to me, but I’m sure not going to tell somebody they can’t have one.
If it really is as bad as all that, I guess I’m happy that I’ve only ever skimmed the surface at Reddit for anything.
No. It isn’t “that bad.” Just more stirring up shit where there is none. Creating a problem just so that a “solution” can be found.
“Gatekeeping” and “being an elitist prick” are not the same thing.
Plenty of gatekeeping is perfectly fine.
Not allowing someone to participate unil thy reach some minimum level of knowledge or commitment can be a VERY good thing.
Just because someone can, for example, afford a 2kg drone, doesn’t mean they should be allowed to fly it. And it shouldn’t be their first drone.
On the other hand, being a jerk isn’t okay.
But it can be understandable, especially when the ‘newbie’ is being impatient or entitled.
If I take the time to write instructions in a forum post I expect people to read it before asking for help. Yet, there will inevitably be 5 replies requesting help where it is clear that they didn’t read past the first few sentences and looked at a few of the pictures.
“Please go read the instructions again and tell me where you are having the problem, with as much detail as you can.”
People often just want stuff to work.
They don’t just “not care” to understand the system, they actively avoid leaning it.
I will bend over backwards to help you learn a thing or fix an issue, IF QND ONLY IF you are also willing to do the work on your side too.
You don’t need to deep dive.
You don’t need to become an expert.
But if you simply expect me to fix your problem IMMEDIATELY with no effort on your part, you can GTFO. You aren’t welcome here, and you are wasting time that I could be using to help others.
I’ll be polite about it though.
(Despite how difficult it can often be…)
Didn’t like a Model M, didn’t like a Model M! Stone the Heretic! Or better yet beat him with the mighty Model M before getting back to work!
Seriously though I agree it seems rather odd to need a more selective no men allowed club when the existing club appears to be equally welcoming to all (though I only skim as well). That gardeners green and swirly ‘girly’ keyboard isn’t my personal taste, any more than a heap of other keyboards have been, but I and it seems everyone else can appreciate the quality of the execution. Heck I even think I’d have had one like it for one of my machines in the past as it would have suited the decor so well – which is the one thing ‘wrong’ with Model M beige, and old yellowed beige in particular just doesn’t look right alongside all the modern peripheral.
And you are absolutely allowed to like/dislike different things in a keyboard, but for me having spent nearly all my time with Model M (Or their near family) keyboards from toddler playing on Dad’s lap to now they are to me what a keyboard should feel like, though I can appreciate whichever switches happened to be in the cheap(ish) modern mechanical I had to buy when the teensy running Soarer’s scan code convertor let out the magic smoke on me. Not quite as nice in key feel, but good still compared to every other keyboard I’ve ever interacted with and a fair bit quieter, or at least less high pitched in the ping on key activation – been meaning to get a sample pack of all the other keys in the same form factor to try a few and see if anything can match the feel I really want.
This is a brand-new subreddit for women and non-binary folks who are into mechanical keyboards. As it says in the sidebar, men are welcome but limited to the comments for now, so don’t go trying to post your builds.
🙄
Why do you have a problem with that? r/mk is already very welcoming (as the article already said) but that doesn’t mean it can’t be intimidating. Having a separate space for a subcommunity (which is the entire point of reddit) and setting clear and sensible boundaries is entirely for the good.
Nobody is stopping you from making your own and turning it into a hellhole if you so wish, but don’t complain if nobody goes there.
There`s nothing sensible in sexism and blocking completely one gender (at least the mentally healthy part of it) from participating. It does sound like a hellhole indeed…
i understand where you’re coming from. if your values are against exclusion in any community then this development really does go against your values.
something i find again and again in different parts of life is that abstract values are not worth much. for example, in the legal system there is the ‘adversarial process’. they try to do honor to their abstract values but only in the context of a concrete dilemma, two parties that want two different outcomes. with a concrete scenario to consider, the abstractions disappear and a real result comes into focus.
i would ask you to consider outcome-based values instead of abstract ones. so on the one hand i do see a value to every community being inclusive. but hobbyist communities tend to self-select pretty severely. people get into the same thing for different reasons. poorly-managed hobbyist communities are often full of pointless conflict between people saying to eachother “you’re doing it wrong” when they’re actually after different goals. so the outcome i would look for would be that everyone can find a community that fits the way they interact with the hobby.
i have some preconceptions in my head about why different people engage in different aspects of keyboard fandom, and they aren’t all flattering…or probably accurate. but i definitely could see why they’d want to be in different forums, and they’d pick different rules to achieve that result.
presumably one of the reasons they don’t want men dominating their new club is that they already had this conversation you and i are having, and they don’t want to have it again and again. that’s an outcome to consider.
“people get into the same thing for different reasons”
Exactly, you’ve got different kinds of people, into the same kind of thing. So if you want a subreddit for “girly” kb aesthetics – fine! awesome! Discriminate against my “manly” kb posts all you want. But discriminating against me even if I post a flowery kb I made for my wife? That’s sexist trash.
So, for one thing, when men create “men only” spaces, we are condemned as sexist. Therefore, “women only” spaces are similarly sexist. I have no problem with “women only” spaces so long as the opposite is allowed and celebrated equally as well. .
Secondly… we are talking about the internet. Reddit in particular. Reddit is known to be a left leaning, woke space to begin with. Aside from that, though… again… the internet. Where anonymity is king. When you post something on a reddit sub, unless your handle is StrongIndependentDon’tNeedNoManWoman… ain’t nobody gonna know what you are. If you post a project, nobody is going to ask what is between your legs or who you sleep with before they decide if they like your project or not. Unless your gender or sexuality IS your identity, nobody cares.
I post in a model painting group occasionally. My paints of choice are the cheap, acrylic craft paints as opposed to the expensive hobbyist paints that everyone endorses. If I don’t specify with what the models are painted, I get upvotes and accolades. If I DO specify that the models were painted with so-called “inferior” paints, I get downvotes and snide comments. I say this to show that “nobody cares unless you make it a thing.”
But… I guess that’s just me ¯_(ツ)_/¯
See, I would write the place off either way for choosing to police identities instead of content. Even leaving aside the true ideal, where anyone who likes the style can share the same place to talk about it. It’s not the sort of place I’d choose to associate with, if it’s a place where a boy can’t even show what he made for his sister or a man what he made for his wife, or stuff like that, much less something he made for himself if it fits the style.
It’s even worse for still allowing comments from men and boys while disallowing posts. Doing that kind of thing sounds like a compromise but it’s actually a sign that they want to benefit from the presence of a large subordinate group, while keeping that group from gaining any real influence. (And it is a benefit, if you can tailor the moderation guidelines and group attitudes properly). I’m not saying the average isn’t toxic and exclusive towards women and girls, or that it’s in any way easy to moderate without extreme measures, but I want better than having two opposing zones.
And I thought keyboards are gender neutral anyway … DAS keyboard.
(minimal knowledge of German required)
Is anyone making videos of these historical typewriters in use? The functionality of some of them is quite hard to intuit from a photo and description.