Pros:

  • The clickety clack is creamy as hell
  • The dial/knob is very useful already
  • I really like the LED effects when I’m typing.
  • The packaging was superb and it just generally looks amazing

Cons:

  • Shipping (unrelated to keyboard):
    • it took 3 weeks to get here
  • Keys / Spacebar
    • It’s quite a high profile position and I find myself double-hitting the spacebar often which appears to have a hare-trigger
    • The spacebar is needlessly long, and my thumb can’t quite reach the Alt or Win key without contorting my hand.
    • On my laptop, the spacebar begins at C and ends at M. Here it starts at X and ends at ,
  • Customization
    • Modifying it in Linux is proving to be painful.
      • The qmk cli requires a full reflash, but no easy way to set macros
      • VIA has easy macros, but has no cli just a shitty Electron app that requires you to set your keyboard permissions to World Accessible for chrome to detect it (which is creepy).
  • Gaming
    • I knew that some keyboards are better for typing and others for gaming, but I did not think the difference would be so big.
    • The arrow keys could be a lot more responsive
    • I’ve never noticed this issue with a normal keyboard.

I guess I love the look and feel of it, but it’s incredibly frustrating to modify as a linux user and I’m making tons of mistakes with it whilst typing.

Is this all normal? Do I eventually get used to it? Or should I send it back and just use a normal $20 keyboard that I can just type and forget about.

  • tetris11@lemmy.mlOP
    1·
    1 day ago

    The space bar on your Q1 is actually a normal size and profile, any other standard Cherry or OEM keyboard will be nearly identical.

    Yeah I realise this now. I guess I’ve just got to get used to it, or buy a laptop keyboard equivalent.

    https://config.qmk.fm/#/keychron/q1v2/ansi/LAYOUT_ansi_82 You can create keymaps and macros on the QMK website and then flash to the keyboard via the toolbox.

    This is super useful, thank you for this – finally I can flash the keyboard in a way that makes sense.

    https://github.com/the-via/releases/releases You can also download VIA as an application so you dont need to use Chrome.

    It’s an electron app, which still uses chromium I believe, meaning I still need to set creepy world-accessible udev rules for WebHID to work

    Almost all your issues are because its new, and unfamiliar to you, and with some setup and maybe some customization your Q1 will be your new home and you will miss it when you dont have it.

    Yeah I’m going to just try working with it for a week or two before I make a final impression. I’ll update my post once I’m done. The spacebar is currently still a pain point and I’ve noticed myself slowing down to hit space so that it registers only once instead of twice.