A Geek Goes Flying

So apparently I’m building a Royal Kludge RK71  (stock: White, RGB lighting, brown switches; found one in condition “Good - Acceptable” for pennies), with Kailh Hako Royal Clear switches. (Discontinued and on sale.) Found the switch tester I picked up a while ago, and it was - kind of as expected - between Box Royal switches and the Hako Royal Clear, and the Royal Clears felt just a little bit better. Night and day compared to the Box Browns  (and I’ve tried, and hated, “regular” brown switches from Cherry, Gateron, Outemu, etc). A full keyboard with the tactile switches should be interesting, the form factor is good for this application (and it has a Mac layout built in as a layer, with Command/Option legends on the meta keys). This board is soldered, not hot swap, so the soldering station gets a chance to continue to pay for itself. At least now I have experience and confidence ! Other peoples’ videos: Royal Kludge RK71 v2 Review How to Disassemble a Royal Kludge RK71 Up...

Yes, you can do some of this through the OS X / macOS built-in Control Panel (Keyboard -> Modifier Keys... and swap the Command and Option keys), but that doesn’t address the Windows keyboard “menu” key or things like media keys. For that we need to remap the keys using Karabiner (13.x for Catalina or Big Sur; 12.x for Sierra through Catalina; 11.x for El Capitan, 10.x for Mavericks through El Capitan; if you’re still using a “cat” operating system, you might be SOL). I’m preparing for a “build” of a full-size Glorious Modular Mechanical Keyboard (GMMK) I’m going to swap to Kailh Box Pale Blue switches (though I was tempted by the speed with which I could get Kailh Box Jade switches; I like them well enough in another keyboard I’m using them in ). (I don’t really consider swapping one hot switch for another “building” a keyboard; I wish I had the time and wallet to dive as deep into this stuff as the folks who’ve built some of the amazing creations I’ve lusted after on r/Mechani...