Mechanical Keyboard Sound Isn't That Simple
Figure 1: I couldn't think of a more literal way to represent this article if I tried... Looking back just a few years ago, there’s no doubt that the huge influx of people that joined the hobby at the peak of the COVID pandemic were drawn to keyboards by way of YouTube, TikTok, and other audio-visual content platforms. Even as the output from these content creators has waned in recent months, their collective impact and legacy on the keyboard hobby is rather firmly etched in the history books. As a result of all of their sound tests, build logs, and opinion videos, the message is clear to any new person joining the hobby: mechanical keyboards are all about the sound. Thock this, clack that. Whether it’s keyboards, keycaps, or even singular switches, seemingly everyone new to the hobby meticulously pores over each component of their keyboard not in an attempt to figure out how it will feel in hand, but how it will sound as they’re furiously grinding their way out from...
Mar 27, 2024
When connected to a Lenovo T450, pressing a key produces an "equals" character ("="), as configured in the configurator. However, when connected to a Surface Pro 4, the same key produces a "close square bracket" symbol ("]"). Pressing the key configured for "close square bracket" produces an "equals" sign. They're switched.
This only happens with a few symbols, not letters, or numbers. Similarly mixed up symbols include dash, slash, backslash, tilde, question mark, and a few others.
It seems to be related to my default keyboard layout in Windows 10 (US Dvorak, and ErgoDox configured with a corresponding Dvorak layout). Does anyone have any idea of what might be going on? It's just a bit strange that the keyboard reacts different when on different systems. Both systems are configured with UK English as the input language with US Dvorak as the keyboard layout.