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Keychron keyboard discussion

I was text chatting with an science fiction author I know. He has a Dash keyboard. I had one and it was a overpriced hunk of junk. I was describing my Q12 QMK Custom when I mentioned it has the heft of a cast iron frypan that really got his interest.
 
My learning curve with this "leftpaw" keyboard layout is interesting. I realize the getting used to part would be the same if I had one of the compact keyboards that did not have the number pad built in. I have to be real careful about making sure my index fingers are positioned on the home keys. As long as I do that I am good to go. I have spent so much money over the years trying it get a keyboard like the old IBM keyboards. Now that I have found Keychron the search has ended. it isn't so much the clackity clack of the IBM keyboard but the quality those old keyboards had. I also remember how heavy they were. All of this from learning about Keychron on this thread. Thanks to all of you. 🙏🤠
 
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I got the Nuphy keycap set in the mail during the holidays and put the F row on my keyboard. They're ABS and look slightly out of place, but they're the only cherry profile media keys you can get. Since I won't be using them as often as the rest of the keys, I don't think they should bother me too much. The F5 and F6 are also different from Keychron's defaults.
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There is some thing I just discovered about this Q12 QMK Custom keyboard I don't like. There seems to be no indicator on the keyboard to tell you which case the keyboard is locked into. This normally it is not a problem as you get the case lock indication while you are typing. Again this morning my Apple Watch decided not to unlock my Mac. OK I signed in with my pin. No joy, finally got locked out. could not tell which case the Q12 was in. Inner Baboon coming out. Finally i put back the K10 and signed in.
 
transmaster said:
There is some thing I just discovered about this Q12 QMK Custom keyboard I don't like. There seems to be no indicator on the keyboard to tell you which case the keyboard is locked into. This normally it is not a problem as you get the case lock indication while you are typing. Again this morning my Apple Watch decided not to unlock my Mac. OK I signed in with my pin. No joy, finally got locked out. could not tell which case the Q12 was in. Inner Baboon coming out. Finally i put back the K10 and signed in.
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The K4 Pro has the same issue, but the backlight LED does glow by default while caps lock is on, so I got the keycap with the transparent indicator thing for it long before I got the entire cherry profile keycap set.
 
I have a K8 Pro that I purchased with Blues, nice build quality but overall underwhelmed by the Bluetooth reciever/transmitter (latency on wakeup). Will stay on logi/apple hw for wireless. Fine Keyboard for wired though.
 
But I agree with the overall sentiment about the heft of those things, it would definitely dent my floor were I to drop it =).
 
I spent parts of this day in a battle with my Mac Studio. This was a learning curve thing. I needed to change the sign in password. That was a royal thank God for Apple support Mac Noob baboon level of frustration. I now have that figured out and stashed in my memory. But what I did know was when I did this it changed my security settings back to their default setting. A bunch of software I had loaded would no longer work. Finally I found a YouTube that explained what was going on a how to fix it. A little thing I didn't know about this Q10 keyboard was, yes it does not have a indicator on the keyboard to tell you it is in cap's lock, no the cap lock key itself lights up.o_O
 
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transmaster said:
There is some thing I just discovered about this Q12 QMK Custom keyboard I don't like. There seems to be no indicator on the keyboard to tell you which case the keyboard is locked into. This normally it is not a problem as you get the case lock indication while you are typing. Again this morning my Apple Watch decided not to unlock my Mac. OK I signed in with my pin. No joy, finally got locked out. could not tell which case the Q12 was in. Inner Baboon coming out. Finally i put back the K10 and signed in.
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Not completely true.

There is a Caps Lock light under the key, but without translucent keycaps, it's very hard to see. I've got a set of PBTFans keycaps on two of my Keychron keyboards that have a little rectangular window on the Caps Lock key (also on the Num Lock key) to allow the light to shine though.

As a work-around, there are apps you can install on your Mac that will put up a visual indicator and/or sound each time the Caps Lock is toggled so you can see which mode you're in.
 
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It would have been nice to have a direct visual indication for caps lock for sure. How anyone would not offer that on a keyboard of this quality is beyond me.
 
ericwn said:
It would have been nice to have a direct visual indication for caps lock for sure. How anyone would not offer that on a keyboard of this quality is beyond me.
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As the firmware is open source, you could certainly modify it to turn all the keyboard's backlighting to red or something when Caps Lock is engaged.

How to actually program that, however, is not something I can help with.
 
xraydoc said:
As the firmware is open source, you could certainly modify it to turn all the keyboard's backlighting to red or something when Caps Lock is engaged.

How to actually program that, however, is not something I can help with.
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Certainly a possibility but for the sake of simplicity, caps lock should have its own visible led on the stock config. Whether it’s a hole or square I don’t mind but it should be part of the stock key, not the backlight effect. Goes to show when multiple folks struggle with the same problem. It’s out of box.
 
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xraydoc said:
Not completely true.

There is a Caps Lock light under the key, but without translucent keycaps, it's very hard to see. I've got a set of PBTFans keycaps on two of my Keychron keyboards that have a little rectangular window on the Caps Lock key (also on the Num Lock key) to allow the light to shine though.

As a work-around, there are apps you can install on your Mac that will put up a visual indicator and/or sound each time the Caps Lock is toggled so you can see which mode you're in.
Click to expand...

xraydoc said:
As the firmware is open source, you could certainly modify it to turn all the keyboard's backlighting to red or something when Caps Lock is engaged.

How to actually program that, however, is not something I can help with.
Click to expand...
I was looking at the keyboard mapping software and I didn't look to see if light was a option.
 
That's what I was saying about getting a keycap that would let me see it, and then eventually getting an entire set to match. I also put a clicky box jade switch under the caps lock key so I can hear and feel the difference from the other keys when I accidentally press it. The lack of any other indicator on the keyboard and no stock keycap to even do this is quite annoying.

 

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Also, I ordered a Q2 Max and I intend to remap the caps lock key to escape because I use the backtick a lot in coding. So I won't have an annoying caps lock key at all on it. Maybe I'll map fn+caps lock to it if I ever need it.
 
New toy has arrived! The out of the box is significantly better than the K4 Pro, but I can't say I like typing on these keycaps. They look nice but Cherry profile is simply far nicer to actually type on. So I've ordered some of Keychron's pink Dolce keycaps from Amazon. We'll see how those work.
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New keycaps installed. One issue I've noticed is a lot of key chatter with the spacebar. I looked up whether anyone has experienced the same thing on Reddit, and it seems to happen often enough with Q2 variants. I kind of got around it with a heavier U4T switch under the spacebar instead of the stock Gateron banana, and the lighter cherry profile keycap. However, I will still get a double space on occasion and it is annoying. Also, after experimenting with different switches under the spacebar, the spacebar has developed a clicking noise on the right side. My guess is it's the stab rattling. Thats's weird because I have changed the switches so many more times on my old keyboard and the stabs never developed a rattle. I'll be getting some grease in the mail tomorrow to try and fix it. Not too happy with the spacebar issues I've experienced with such an expensive keyboard.

Also, these keycaps are very smooth. Are they really PBT as advertised? I guess time will tell whether they develop a shine or not.

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I’m happy to report I fixed the stab rattling with some grease and now my keyboard feels very nice. I do think it should have been nice out of the box but it is what it is. I still get key chatter with the spacebar on very rare occasions, and it’s rare enough not to bother me too much now. The possibility is something to keep in mind for anyone considering a Q2 of any kind if one is to believe Reddit.
 
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