These have been my couch keyboards for a while. The top one is 2.4gHz wireless, so it needs a receiver which I have plugged into the dock of my GPD Win 3 for when I’m using it on the TV. It’s ok, but the mousepad is kind of bad and the feel isn’t great and also recently it just stopped working completely. The lower one is Bluetooth and I mainly use it with my MiSTer. I like its aesthetic with the round keys, but there are a few things about it that drive me nuts. For one, it doesn’t have any power indicator - there are two lights on it, one for caps lock, one for low battery. There’s no power switch, it just comes on when you press a key and turns itself off when it loses connection or if you idle it for a while. I’d also like some spacing between sections of keys - get the direction buttons a little away from the rest, a gap below the function keys, that sort of thing. Most critically, it has very poor key rollover - not even enough to use the directional keys consistently. I was using it for the MSX core and trying to play shooters, and it would regularly just stop accepting input until I released all keys. I went to the command prompt and tried a test I’d read about online: you hold both shift keys and type “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. I didn’t take a screenshot of the output but it came out missing a lot of letters - no T, “lazy” became just “z”. I tried it while holding down caps lock as well and got letters at all, so it seems this thing can’t take more than three inputs at a time.
Anyway, none of this has been a particularly big deal because I don’t actually use the keyboard from the couch very often, but I recently got a retroid pocket and typing on that thing has been killing me because the on screen keyboard takes up half of the tiny screen and very often covers over the text you’re typing, so I started thinking about wireless keyboards again. My broad preference is something that looks like the ones I grew up with in the late 80s/early 90s, so I looked at mechanicals. It seems like a lot of mechanical keyboard enthusiasts have very different priorities to me, though. I wanted a keyboard that was wireless (BT and also 2.4), but with the option for USB connection, quiet, able to register many inputs at once, a bit of key separation, a power indicator light, and most crucially of all: it had to fit in the 33cm wide drawer where I keep my couch keyboards. After spending a while looking at various things, I bought:
A Royal Kludge (fantastic company name, by the by) M75. It’s got more or less the layout that I wanted (a bit annoying that it has home, pgup, and pgdn but no separate end key - it’s mapped to fn+pgdn), it has n-key rollover (though that’s when plugged in. I didn’t see anything saying how many keys it can handle wireless, but it passes the double shift quick brown fox test and seems to handle multiple direction keys in MSX shooters ok), it does Bluetooth and 2.4, and it has three little lights on its front. None of them are a power light (I really don’t understand why this isn’t just a standard feature - when I was browsing keyboards many of them didn’t seem to have one and even ones that did have indicator lights didn’t say what they were for), but the middle one indicates the keyboard is set to windows layout so it can kind of function as a de facto power light. Plus there’s that black rectangle:
Having a little screen on the keyboard is frankly decadent, but I do like being able to see the battery percentage and connection method, plus when the screen is on I know the keyboard is on. It doesn’t have any physical switches, so you power on and off by pushing in the knob at the top right for three seconds. The knob also controls connection - pressing it briefly brings up a menu on the little screen where you can select wired/2.4/BT1/2/3. I prefer this to the way it’s done on a lot of other keyboards where you select between then by pressing the function button plus a number key because I can’t remember those combinations. The knob also functions as a volume control apparently but you have to install drivers or something - I don’t really see the point for my use case.
The other thing this keyboard does, in common with pretty much every wireless mechanical keyboard it seems, is this RGB lighting. I could see the benefit of this if it had transparent captions on the keys so you could identify them in the dark. The caps on this keyboard are opaque so for me this function is, in the immortal words of Harper Lee, a waste of fucking energy. On the plus side the battery size was chosen to accomodate it so I should get pretty good time between charges when I’m not using the lights. I think this is the number one thing where I’m like “what are keyboard enthusiasts thinking”. I just don’t see the appeal. But I am an old man. Number two is the sound. The sell these with switches that are designed to audibly click when you press the keys (not the version I bought). What the hell? And the way they talk about the sounds - “thock” I can understand, but this keyboard was described as “creamy” sounding. I cannot figure out what that means. But enthusiasts have their jargon, I shouldn’t judge.
The most important test: it fits in my drawer. I was a little nervous about this because the stated width is 328mm and the drawer is about 330 - not a lot of leeway. So yeah, based on about ten minutes of actual use this keyboard seems pretty well suited to my particular wants.
