What’s your favourite keyboard, Guru?

Jane Pearson, West erleigh

As you know by now, Guru must maintain a delicate balance between jumping on nerdy trends and pouring boiling scorn on them. In the case of mechanical keyboards, which have recently turned the corner from clacky office annoyance to colourful, expensive, customisable, desk status symbol clacky office annoyance, GaGu’s affections are definitely landing more on the positive side despite his better judgement.

The big problem with an enthusiast market is that there’s not one single item to recommend. If you’re happy to only dip your toe in the water, there are stacks of pre-built and very good keyboards pouring onto the market from manufacturers like Corsair, Razer, Logitech and more. The far eastern market is picking up too; take a look at Bloody’s range of Light Strike keyboards, oddly abbreviated ‘LK’, which combine a mechanical action with actual lasers for almost

Ainstantaneous actuation. They’re surprisingly good for a brand with such a silly name.

The truest test of an exciteable typing man is browsing the likes of Massdrop and somehow selecting what’s right for you. First choice is the keyswitches themselves: opt for Cherry Blue switches if you like to type noisy, browns if you prefer a softer feel, or a smooth-moulded, hens-teeth rare Cherry clone like the Outemu if you really want to be on the cutting edge.

Then there’s everything else. Will you go for a full keyboard layout with a number pad, a 75 per cent, 66 per cent, the weird split form of the Ergodox? Do you want keyswitch dampers and LEDs? Will you go pre-built or whip out a soldering iron for a build-it-yourself kit? Just which sparkly artisan keycaps will you decide to drop upwards of £15 per key on? This is a hobby that, however satisfying it may be, gets very expensive and very silly very quickly.