My wife has _ two_ Kinesis Advantage keyboards. The new price is… steep… but at least one of them was reasonable at a used price. We disassembled it and cleaned everything when it arrived.
She used to have horrific carpal tunnel pain, but it’s gone now.
No you’re absolutely right to criticize it for those features, especially if it affects your use! I just think KB backlighting in general is a solution looking for a problem (and a result of gaming PC peripherals now needing to have RGB lights plastered over literally everything and anything) vs actually being better than well-marked keycaps.
Cherry and Gat browns are usually praised because they split the middle between linear and clicky switches (without the noise of clicky blues or greens), so they’re a good overall option to suggest to anyone that hasn’t used many mech switches before (and probably isn’t used to linear if they’ve been using rubber dome or laptop keebs). I will say that other tactile options are much, much better at doing what they should do… they’re just much more expensive and restricted to custom builds normally.
If you or anyone else here ever does want another board kbdfans.com is my personal favorite to order from. Lots of options and they can build it for you if you’re not comfortable soldering (should be rare on this site lol). That said lots of boards are “hot-swappble” now so you just pop new switches in/out whenever you want.
Interesting to see that mentioned.
I wanted to say they give me a laptop kind of feel, surely it got me thinking about that. Even reminded me a bit about the rubber dome keys.
I looked around and it seems they are kind of out of stock on the 65% front. But I would be nice I could see some other types of switch brands, except each will need their own keycaps, here I mean, Box, Alps, etc, kind of costly just to try out, even if I am sure I would find something suitable for me.
I used to be into the custom mech keyboard game. A couple of years ago I did a build that was pretty much endgame for me; pretty much been using it exclusively ever since (except for the HHKB-S which goes to work with me each day).
Mira SE lunar grey case, black anodized aluminum full plate, brass weight (cutouts in the bottom for the Mira logo 
), Zeal gold-plated PCB mount stabilizers, lubed/stickered/spring swapped (24kt SPRiT 62g) Cherry “Ergo” Clears (Black for spacebar).
For the uninitiated, Ergo Clears have a tiny bit more actuation force than a Cherry Brown but the tactile bump is significantly larger and more prominent.
I like cherry red keys. My reddragon is good and i just bought a used keyboard fro ebay. will let you know
You can always get a hot-swappable switch tester which should be pretty affordable still. I think there are still sites selling low quantity and/or variety/sample packs of switches.
I really, really wish I had the patience to mod and lube switches but I think I’d just go crazy lol. Fantastic build though and I’m happy you do have the patience!
It’s definitely tedious. I usually just put on a TV show or something and do it kind of mindlessly over the course of a few days. It’s worth it in the long run!
Hmm, I could try that. Knowing my luck the dog would bump my work surface and knock them all over my living room though!
I too am a bit of a KB snob.
Someplace in my shop is a test set of Cherry switches from years ago.
They are attached in a row for testing. There were like 5 or 7 of them(?).
It also had all the various o-rings to mod the touch. Cherry put these out as dealer samples or something. Eventually I could tell the difference between most of them.
It was a gas to bring out if a keyboard snob started droning on about the ghosts of keyboards past.
I have an Arabic KB from the AT era.
It was fun to stick in on someones desk and watch the reactions.
Ever now and then a user would start fussing with their glasses and keep looking back at the KB.
Somehow all the squiggles never changed back to letters.
I almost ditched my old IBM mech keyboards a few years ago.
I decided to check ebay to see if they were of any value to someone.
YeeGads! I had no idea. So back into bags on the shelf they went.
50 years ago or so my mom could bang out like 90 WPM on an old manual non-electric typewriter.
It was like listening to a Tommy gun firing.
All the Best,
Jeff
The fact that people could type so fast on manual typewriters is amazing to me. Must have had some serious strength in their hands and fingers! Not to mention accuracy, when you couldn’t simply backspace and easily correct a mistake.
She worked in some senators office on capital hill in DC for many years. They also used to sign the Senators name to all sorts of correspondence for them.
I have a friend who was a lineotype operator.
You should see those guys go, usually with two fingers.
Making molten lead into printed words. Magic.
Basically the same since the late 1400s just with a machine to cast the type into lines instead of placing the characters one at a time.
When he retired he gave me some of his old lead type sets. Tool Cool.
Imagine setting say, a dictionary, bible, or encyclopedia one letter at a time.
Upside down and backwards naturally.
Lots of terms come from that era. “Out of Sorts” refers to running out of characters in the box where the type is kept sorted by character.
“Leading” (spoken like the metal with ing on the end) is the space between lines.
Made by inserting strips of lead between the rows of type.
All the Best,
Jeff
Neat post, Jeff! Thanks for reminding me of the linotype. 
I’d never heard of the linotype until I stumbled upon a video about it a few years ago.
I can’t find the video I remember seeing, but there are lots on YouTube about the linotype.
This one gives a good explanation of the workings and some closeup views of the different mechanisms:
This one is also good, featuring ‘The Saguache Crescent,’ a Colorado newspaper still using the linotype:
This one is very in-depth, produced by an Italian vocational school:
Modern technology is always cool but it’s really amazing to go back and look at how tasks we take for granted now required some serious ingenuity and arduous work to accomplish (until the later half of the 20th century for the most part).