Came up with this late at night. Not while being anywhere near a laptop though.
I used to think this way as I've been able to touch type for a very long time but in total darkness it's very nice to be able to find a key/orient things.
I touch type too, but I’ll be damned if I can find the right F key without looking
Your keyboard should have two nubbins on it so you can easily find the F key without looking (it puts your hands in the home row). If your keyboard doesn't have these, then either it's 100 years old and someone is typing with the force of a gorilla, or you have an extremely strange keyboard.
The real tricky part are the less used symbol keys.
I think he is talking about function key, F1 to f12 ;)
Lol I'm dumb
Happens to the best ^^
It is nice for the less used keys. For orientation there is this thing in the middle of some keyboards.
Lighting is also helpful in finding the keyboard.
total darkness isn't so good tho.
dim indirect light from behind the screen is best IMO and that's also enough to find that rare key, as well as your drink without knocking it over and causing havoc.
I don't care for the RGB in itself I like the backlight so it's easier to see the keys in the dark
I've tilted my screen down to try to illuminate the keyboard too many times
DJs, Astronomers, lightning technicians at venues, dark scientists etc, so many people require a backlit keyboard for hobby or work
But ... sometimes it's dark
Then turn on a light
The light in my keyboard?
I would genuinely pay more if I could get high quality hardware that wasn't infected with rainbow RGB nonsense.
Most RGB peripherals I've owned I was able to toggle completely off.
I'm also not an RGB enjoyer, I usually just set it all to the same static color, on the lowest dimness.
White
I'm a soft, light lavender RGB on white peripherals kind of guy.
Purple here for a while now. Maybe it's time for a change.
Lavender is nice too!
I don't need rainbow rgb, but a nice, dim, through key white backlight is very valuable on a laptop that's used regularly
kbdfans.com
I like to see them in the dark
I genuinely don’t get the love for RGB things.
I don’t know why people like them, why they always have those weird cycle modes, and a lot of them flicker or actually cycle at a fairly slow rate which is distracting.
I can see my keyboard at night, and the keys get buffs based on the color.
I don't know that the high prevalence of RGB items on the market necessarily reflects a love for it. I think it just means it's cheap to produce and can be marketed as an extra feature.
GN recently mentioned that apparently there's a demand for water coolers with screens on them (even tho they cost more) so manufacturers are making more such models. Extrapolate to rgb
I browse the web at night, I want to see what I type. It's as simple as that!
All the cool kids use the lamp
This is some Gameboy brick edition attachment level. Just needs the magnifier screen to slide over it.
If i need backlit keys to see what I'm typing then the room is also too dark to be looking at a screen. Look after your eyes guys.
Why would I need letters at all?
Another Infinity Ergodox run needs to happen.
YES. I would order ~3 more just for redundancy. If this one breaks, I dont know what I'm going to do.
I'd almost have to one-off a few custom pcbs and laser cut everything myself.
I don't need to look at the most common keys or the letters; but some of the weirder ones I don't use often, I might have to actually look at the board for. Having them backlit helps see when it's dark. 🤷🏻♂️
I don't need LED keyboards, but with open source software I can get that shit synced up with so many other pretty things like my computer LEDs, headset, speakers, aquarium, toaster oven, zen garden, and maybe even my mouse.
A little bit of an exaggeration, but younger me would totally rock a neon punk look if I had the budget for fashion, which I still don't have.
My keyboard does not require backlit keys because I am a power user.
I just wish they wrote the function key text in a bright colour so I can see it in low light…
My samsung laptop has no way to change the backlight from Linux so it stays off. If only there were a way to this in a standardised way (acpi) samsung?
I need backlit keys so I can see from outside my office if I have left my pc on at night. Very important.
I never sought them out. The laptop just came that way.
I've had this ErgoDox for, like, 6 years. It has underlights, but no backlights, but also no home row keys. The entire time I've owned it, in the dark I've struggled to find the home row, often taking seconds to find my finger placement by feeling the edges of the keyspace. It's been a constant source of irritation, but it never occurred to me to just buy some home row caps.
Anyway, I was tidying up to office the other day, and found a little packet that came with the keyboard containing home row caps. FML, but with a silver lining, right?
In the process of swapping out those two caps, I completely broke the J switch. So now I'm (temporarily) using a Kinesis Gaming keyboard and learning an object lesson about how utterly miserable row stagger is.
My point is that backlighting would probably have saved me a lot of grief; not as much as home row keys, but still better than nothing.
I look at my keys when I type and I’m not ashamed of that. I always have, since Oregon trails on 5.25 floppy in the early 90s.
I could probably train myself out of it, and I can type whole sentences without looking, but only with the 6 fingers I normally use, rather than the full 8 most people use, and it’s a fucking chore. Frankly, it seems like a massive waste of mental resources to learn to type without looking, and I actively resisted learning it in typing classes in middle/highschool. I’m not doing data entry, so whatever I’m writing is a creative process, and that benefits from sight. I get eyes on what I’m doing while I’m doing it, and again when I check it over. It worked out very well for me when I started typing in Cyrillic, I just added transparent stickers. Homework was a breeze; I was looking anyway! :)
Yes I fucking want backlit keys. Even if just for when I’m laying in bed at a weird angle and can’t see the key layout, or sitting in a dark room. I would want them in a drunken stupor, too, even tho I use my phone for that browsing, which is backlit by default.
In summary, backlit keys are the shit. I spent a gob of money on a backlit, rechargeable, wireless keyboard, and I regret nothing.
Y'all got any more of those 2008 HP office desktop keyboards?
i can't figure out how to enable them
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