I broke my Logitech DiNovo Mac Edition keyboard somehow a few days ago (23AS keys don’t work well, don’t work at all if I hold down shift) and I’ve been bringing my Logitech DiNovo Media keyboard back and forth from home. Today, my new keyboard came in, the Steelseries G6v2. So, while this is a great feeling keyboard, and overall I think it was a great first choice to start my way into the field of mechanical keyboards, it has two things that I’m still getting used to that are worth pointing out to anyone else considering using this keyboard: Between the left control and alt keys is not a meta/command/win key. It is a function (Fn) key. There’s no way to change this either— I even contacted support. Because of the way the keyboard is built, it is only used to switch the behavior of the handful of keys with Fn behavior (F1-F6). They do proudly mention this on their website, because their reasoning is that the Win key is almost never used in gaming, whereas improving the access to volume controls is a plus. Unfortunately, I was using the meta key a fair amount on my systems, as I’m rather fond of the Win+Arrow key behavior that Vista introduced, and even wrote a script to mimic this behavior on my workstation. Second, they have the old style L-shaped enter key on this, and put the slash key below it, pushing the right shift key to be smaller. I think I’ll be able to adapt to both of these without too much struggle. I’ve remapped my capslock key to be a meta key, which seems to be working fine and I’m already nearly retrained. I think I’ll just have to get used to the new placement of the slash key, but I’m not that worried. On the positive side of things, I’m enjoying the feeling of this keyboard a lot. It’s taller (meh) but not having to fully depress the keys feels more natural then it sounds. It also makes the keyboard a lot more quiet then people would lead you to believe; most videos I could find on Youtube or similar that compared the noise levels of various mechanical switched keyboards seemed to bottom out with force on nearly every keystroke. Overall, while I do bottom out some, I think I do it with substantially less force then any of the videos indicate, and when I’m doing simple things (like using the jk hotkeys in gmail) I don’t bottom out at all, and this keyboard is near silent. Anyway, I’ll update again later when I’ve had a chance to build up some more mileage with this keyboard. I will take it home with me at least for the weekend just to get more used to typing on it.

I broke my Logitech DiNovo Mac Edition keyboard somehow a few days ago (23AS keys don’t work well, don’t work at all if I hold down shift) and I’ve been bringing my Logitech DiNovo Media keyboard back and forth from home. Today, my new keyboard came in, the Steelseries G6v2.

So, while this is a great feeling keyboard, and overall I think it was a great first choice to start my way into the field of mechanical keyboards, it has two things that I’m still getting used to that are worth pointing out to anyone else considering using this keyboard:

I think I’ll be able to adapt to both of these without too much struggle. I’ve remapped my capslock key to be a meta key, which seems to be working fine and I’m already nearly retrained. I think I’ll just have to get used to the new placement of the slash key, but I’m not that worried.

On the positive side of things, I’m enjoying the feeling of this keyboard a lot. It’s taller (meh) but not having to fully depress the keys feels more natural then it sounds. It also makes the keyboard a lot more quiet then people would lead you to believe; most videos I could find on Youtube or similar that compared the noise levels of various mechanical switched keyboards seemed to bottom out with force on nearly every keystroke. Overall, while I do bottom out some, I think I do it with substantially less force then any of the videos indicate, and when I’m doing simple things (like using the jk hotkeys in gmail) I don’t bottom out at all, and this keyboard is near silent.

Anyway, I’ll update again later when I’ve had a chance to build up some more mileage with this keyboard. I will take it home with me at least for the weekend just to get more used to typing on it.