Only buy a magnetic keyboard for gaming

If you aren't a gamer is a keyboard with this tech worth looking at?

Do you fully press (or mostly fully press) your keys when you type? If so, then no, Hall Effect keyboards probably aren't going to get you anything a mechanical keyboard won't. The headline feature is extremely high sensitivity, i.e. you barely have to tap the key for it to register.

The question that should have been answered, but wasn't.

Since booleans default to false, I would say: no.

More seriously, if you assign different meanings to a key relating to how deep it gets pressed, it will result in lots of key misses I suppose. You will have to develop a piano feel, but for a piano there is a correlation with loudness.

So if you define a soft action for a gentle press on space, and a "stronger" action for a deep press on space, maybe you can do useful things without fucking up your typing.

Things like: going to

  start of word, (soft)
  start of sentence (medium)
  column 0 (hard)

But i am a bit wary about how precise and consistent the board will be. But if it works, it might save on key combinations to learn.

If you like mechanical keyboards with relatively light to mid-weight linear switches, you’ll probably enjoy Hall effect switches.

Being contactless, they’re extremely smooth, quiet and reliable, and being able to set the actuation point exactly where you want it is a very nice bonus.

I’ve been using a Monsgeek M1 HE (I think probably still the cheapest option on the market, even though it’s an incredibly solid block of aluminium) since the summer, mostly just for coding, and for me it’s the best keyboard I’ve ever used.

If your preference is for tactile/clicky switches, or heavier linear switches that you hit hard enough to bottom out, or you’re perfectly happy with any old membrane keyboard, it’s probably not worth the expense.

To me, the headline feature is full control of sensitivity, in real-time if you want.

A standard mechanical keyboard has a fixed actuation point. If you want to change that you need to replace the switches. A Hall-Effect keyboard allows you to tune the actuation point exactly where you like. You can also tune the actuation and reset points independently and even in relation to each other. That allows you to have a reset on a slight raise of the finger without having to raise past as absolute point in travel.

As an example of how the analog nature of HE keyboard could be useful, you could (in theory) set it up so that key repeat rate is adjusted based on how far past actuation you have the key. So, if I press harder the key repeats faster. Sure, you can solve the same problem with navigation shortcuts, but the point is that having a keyboard that captures an analog value for each key opens a wide range of possible use cases. I'm personally ecstatic that they are finally releasing Low-Profile HE keyboards.

I got one a couple months ago, I _really_ enjoy typing on it and use it for programming. Perhaps I just never found the right mechanical keyboard, but it feels like my fingers just glide over it when typing.

There's no tactile feedback when the switch activates, but you can adjust the actuation point of the switch to where it feels comfortable to you. I've set mine to be just about as sensitive as possible.

I think that's what I like most about typing on a HE keyboard, you don't have to press the key all the way into the backstop, so there's less impact on your fingers.

slam the keys hard enough and you get all caps?

I don't think it's worth much even if you are a gamer. Unless you're at the absolute top of the game, the fraction of a second you save on your inputs isn't going to make a bit of difference (and even for those at the top of the game I have serious doubts that it would). But a lot of gamers are young and extremely gullible, so it's easy to sell them snake oil like this. This sort of thing is like the high end cables marketed to audiophiles, it is all hype and no substance.

The tunable actuation/analog sensitivity are really cool, but I was trying to look at it from the perspective of a programmer. The tunable actuation might be nice if you have a very particular way of touch-typing, but I (and most people I know) fully depress keys as they type, or at least they come very close to it. I personally use low profile Gateron Browns in my Keychron K3 Pro, and I bottom them out on nearly every keystroke.

And sure, the analog travel sensing is really cool too. You could make a keyboard do a lot of things with that, but as a dev I can't think of something I'd want my keyboard to do with that feature.

One thing I do find exciting is the potential longevity of a keyswitch with no electrical contacts except for the ones that connect the key to the circuit board.