I type for a living. A lot of people type for a living, and in this day and age in the 21st century one should know how to type. A few years ago I saw a fellow co-worker typing out code on their laptop and they did it with two fingers. I don’t know how they typed for a living. I often think of how lucky I am that my mother taught me how to type when I was in fifth grade. “If you’re going to use this typewriter, you should use the right fingers”. So my mother taught me how to type and 40+ years later I can still type between 90 and 110 words per minute, depending on my stamina and the keyboard.
Because I’m what I’ll call a “legacy geek”, I like keyboards with a lot of hefty and a confident response. I’m not a fan of the mushy membrane keyboards that tend to come with PC setups or laptop docking stations these days. And I’m really not a fan of many keyboards found on PC laptops. Interestingly, I never had an issue with the very flawed-by-design Apple “butterfly” keyboards they abandoned a year or two ago; I can fly right along on my husband’s MacBook Pro from that era and he’s never had a hardware failure from a speck of dust falling into the keyboard or something.
A requirement of a keyboard that shall be graced with my fingers is that it has to have a full sized function key row, or at the very least, a decently sized Escape key. As mentioned, I’m a “legacy geek”. In my day to day workflow I still use an editor called vim, which uses what are now considered archaic keystrokes to navigate and otherwise do things in a text editor. It’s not rare to see a document I’ve typed with wwwwww or jjjjjjjj accidentally typed in the code. The “w” in vi or vim is used to move the cursor by word, the j key moves down a line.
Here’s an eight minute tutorial of how vim or vi works
Back to the keyboard.
In addition to having a confident feel and response, I prefer a keyboard that does not have a numeric keypad. I don’t type numbers that much but more importantly, I don’t like reaching over the extra couple of inches to get to my mouse. I like my mouse to be close at hand so I’m not reaching around on my desk. Plus, I just don’t like giving up the desk real estate for the bigger keyboard. So I go with “tenkeyless” keyboards. Except once in a while I want a small keyboard where I can use a numeric keypad.
Enter the Havit Mechanical Wired keyboard. (Link to Amazon). This keyboard features red switches, has a fantastic response feel to it, but more importantly, incorporates a numeric keypad where the usual other navigation keys are located. The keypad layout uses the original IBM PC layout of home-end-insert-del, so it hearkens back to my teenage years and using an IBM PC in the high school business office. I have it on one of my Linux computers and I am thoroughly enjoying the typing experience. It’s still a little loud (the switches are mechanical, after all), but it’s not as loud as my Velocifire keyboards with Brown Switches. Yet, people still know when I’m typing. I don’t know if the neighbors can hear me or not, but the rest of the family definitely knows when I’m typing and sounding productive.
I recommend this keyboard for enthusiasts who like a smaller footprint, but still need a numeric keypad. It’s clicky, but I find it a delight to use.
