I Didn't Know Keyboards Like These Existed #Keyboards #Dareu #Shorts

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

Transcript

All my life, I've only had membrane keyboards of various styles from different manufacturers. I did own a Razer Ornata Chroma in the name of a mechanical keyboard but that was still mecha-membrane and not entirely mechanical. Courtesy to my brother, I also had a chance to try a Razer Huntsman Tournament Edition which is an optical keyboard, not mechanical either.

Then after daily-ing my personal all-time favorite, the Logitech MX Keys for years (which literally had all the ten things I was looking for in a keyboard back in the day), I got an opportunity to try the Dareu Cool68, which is a magnetic keyboard with hall-effect sensors for switches. The layout is a little too compact for my taste, especially after coming from a full-layout keyboard like the MX Keys. The switches are smooth and pretty satisfying to type on.

Illumination is for more than just the keys, and all of it can be controlled and changed from the keyboard itself without having to install bloatware on your Windows machine, or fighting with open-source tools on Linux in my case. There is a lot of other configuration for which there is a web-based interface that I haven't been able to run on Linux, but for that you can borrow a friend's Windows machine, as you won't need it as often anyway. However, there's something else these enthusiast keyboards provide that I was yet to experience.

Even with all the RGB lighting, the factory key caps didn't come with illuminated legends making it harder to read them in darkness (which is how I usually like to work), but then I replaced them with aftermarket key caps. Not only do these let some light pass through the key caps, but they do that from the sides of the keys instead the top giving them a super clean look. Maybe I won't have to worry about messing up the prints on the key caps with my fingers hitting them over and over again.

But yes, I wouldn't have known keyboards like these existed, had I not looked past my MX Keys.